Provisional Coursework
管理会计系统的存在有助于管理者计划（战术和战略），控制和决策。任何管理会计系统的目标都应该是以某种方式支持这些管理活动中的一项或多项。
对于这项任务，您应该将现代（后机械化）管理会计技术与具有相同（或类似）目标的传统技术进行比较。写一份2000字的报告，其中你：
•参考适当的研究证据（使用哈佛参考）和您自己的分析，讨论每种技术的目标、优势和弱点。
•将技术与其在管理会计发展中的地位联系起来。

来源
需要查阅的有用期刊包括：
管理会计研究
管理会计研究杂志
国际会计杂志
会计审计与问责制杂志
会计审查
会计研究杂志
会计与商业研究
技术
传统技术包括（但不限于）：
成本加成定价
基于体积的间接吸收
投资回报率
预算设置
盈亏平衡分析
DCF
弹性预算
预测
边际成本法
模拟
标准成本法
转让定价
方差分析
后机械技术包括（但不限于）：
目标成本法
作业成本法
平衡记分卡
基于活动的预算
基于活动的成本管理
标杆管理
客户盈利能力分析
分销渠道盈利能力分析
生命周期成本计算
非财务绩效指标
质量成本分析
资源消耗核算
风险分析
目标成本法
学习目标
•考虑到传统和新方法，对主要管理会计系统表示赞赏
•严格评估管理会计变更的方向
Executive Summary

The aim of this report is to argue how management accounting systems function in the decision making processes in management activities, by taking the volume based overhead absorption and the activity based costing for an instance.

This report will comprise the introduction and evaluation of the volume based overhead absorption and the activity based costing, their function in decision making process, the distinctions between them, and an optimized suggestion of approach to this kind of accounting system. And the evaluation of these two management accounting approaches will be hinged on their effectiveness in decision making, including their objectives, strengths and weaknesses.

Introduction

It is known that management accounting is an internal business function that includes the recording and reporting of a company's financial transactions. The accounting systems are supposed to support management in different business operations, providing analysis and support for different decisions and investments (Vitez, 2012). And the whole actions in a company, however, can be divided into several parts as designing, modeling, purchase, produce, marketing and delivering, and after sales services (Braun, et al, 2011). The financial accounting only requires taking the purchasing and producing periods into consideration when it comes to costing calculating, but actually, the whole six processes are supposed to be considered if the company need to earn profit. So here comes a significant question: how to define the cost. This question is the most basic one in managerial decision making, for it involves in many other activities such as pricing, cost volume profit analysis, budget volume variances analysis, and special order decisions.

The approaches used by management accounting to calculate the cost of goods is definitely different from financial accounting. This difference mainly exists in the allocation of overhead costing. For all the costs, it is easy to trace the direct cost into the products, so the main problem lies in the absorption of the indirect costs. Indirect costs are those that cannot be traced into specific products directly. This causes difficulties in establishing how much a product or service actually costs in total. Here there are two approaches to overhead costing: one is called volume based overhead absorption, which is a traditional absorption costing approach; the other is called activity based costing, which is a one put forward in the academic works in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s (Indirectcost. 2012).

The Volume Based Absorption Costing

The purpose of overhead absorption is to share out indirect costs, which is also called overheads, between the various cost objects, for example, products or services, on some appropriate basis. In this way we can attempt to establish the full cost, total absorption cost, of every item produced or service offered.

This traditional costing method often uses four steps to allocate the overheads.

The first step is to analyze the existing financial statements of last periods to re-distribute all the overheads so that they can be all divided into the departments that actually produce the products. For example, in a manufacturing company that produces tables, the two main production centers are assembly and painting, so all the overhead costs occurred during the process of administration, delivering, marketing and so on are supposed to be analyzed and eventually be allocated into the two producing centers: assembly and painting. In this step, the overhead allocation and absorption basis should be decided and the predetermined rates should be calculated separately. These rates will be used in the following steps.

The second step is to allocate the actual overhead costs happened in this period into the product centers basing on the overhead allocation and absorption basis and the predetermined rates. Now the overheads of administration, delivering, marketing and so on are zero and all the costs are split into two centers: assembly and painting.

Now we are now in a position to calculate the full (absorption) cost of each product. This will vary depending on how the business chooses to absorb, or to recover, the overhead costs, all of which are in assembly and painting center, into each product.

In practice, under the traditional methodologies, there are a huge number of different overhead recovery methods which can be applied. And the most often considered ones are two commonly used overhead recovery methods, one is based on labor hours and the other is based on machine hours used in the two production departments. So here it comes the third step, to allocate all the overhead costs into each single product by using the basis of labor hours or machine hours every product uses.

Finally, the forth step, add the direct cost to the allocated indirect cost then you can get the result of the full unit cost.