AC415      Half Unit
Management Accounting for Decision Making

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Mutually exclusive courses:

This course cannot be taken with AC490 at any time on the same degree programme.

This course is focused on management accounting, which is a key function in organisations that involves developing and using financial and non-financial information to support decision making, not only in a technical sense, but bearing in mind that the way in which management accounting systems are designed and implemented often determines whether employees will be motivated to act in ways that are congruent with the objectives of the organisation.

The discipline of management accounting is often partitioned into (1) cost and management accounting systems and (2) management control systems, where the latter is the key focus of another course, AC411. AC415 can, but is not required to, be taken with AC411. Students can take AC411 or AC415, or both.

Returning to AC415, while financial accounting requires that product cost information be accumulated in particular ways for external reporting, the focus in AC415 is on cost and other accounting and non-accounting information systems that aid managerial decision making. This includes the study of management accounting systems in widespread use today as well as an analysis of the problems associated with these systems in today’s business environment (such as their tendency to provide distorted product cost information), as well as approaches to mitigate these problems (eg, activity-based costing; use of non-financial information).

With the above brief overview in mind, this course analyses key concepts which form the discipline of management accounting:

- Product costing and pricing
- Activity-based costing/management (ABC/ABM)
- Profitability and variance analysis
- Transfer pricing including tax considerations for international transactions
- Performance measurement and incentive compensation systems

30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Teaching is delivered in two weekly 90-minute sessions over 10 weeks across Autumn Term. Week 6 is a reading week.

Each session is is almost exclusively taught by way of the case method of instruction. Case studies permit the exploration of management accounting issues in a broad range of settings. The case method of instruction, however, requires good advance preparation by the students, and every person should be ready to contribute to the case discussion when called upon. Students should expect to be "cold called" and not count on being able to hide behind classmates who volunteer to participate.

The course makes extensive use of case studies. Students are expected to contribute to the case discussions by having read the case study and related materials in advance of the session and by participating in the discussion and offering their own analysis, views and/or perspectives on the issue at hand during the session.

A detailed reading list is laid out for each session on the syllabus.

Bhimani, A., C.T. Horngren, S.M. Datar, and M.V. Rajan (“BHDR”),  2023,  Management and Cost Accounting, (Pearson, 8th Edition);

Merchant, K.A., and W.A. Van der Stede, 2023,  Management Control Systems: Performance Measurement, Evaluation, and Incentives (Pearson, 5th Edition).

Exam (75%), duration: 120 Minutes in the January exam period

Case analysis / study (25%)