MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING
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MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING AND FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING
Accounting is usually seen as having two distinct strands. These are:
■
management accounting
, which seeks to meet the accounting needs of managers; and
■
financial accounting
, which seeks to meet the needs of owners and lenders. It should
also, however, be useful to other users, identified
earlier in the chapter , excluding the
managers (see Figure 1.1).
The difference in their targeted user groups has led to each strand of accounting developing
along different lines. The main areas of difference are as follows:
■
Nature of the reports produced.
Financial accounting reports tend to be general-purpose.
As mentioned above, they are aimed primarily at providers of finance (owners and lenders)
but contain financial information that should also be useful for a broad range of external
users.
Management accounting reports, on the other hand,
are often specific-purpose
reports. They are designed with a particular decision in mind and/or for a particular
manager.
■
Level of detail.
Financial accounting reports provide users with a broad overview of the
performance and position of the business for a period. As a result, information is aggre-
gated (that is, added together) and detail is often lost. Management accounting reports,
however, often provide managers with considerable detail to help them with a particular
operational decision.
■
Regulations.
Financial accounting reports, for many businesses, are subject to accounting
regulations imposed by the law and accounting rule makers.
These regulations often
require a standard content and, perhaps, a standard format to be adopted. Management
accounting reports, on the other hand, are not subject to regulation and can be designed
to meet the needs of particular managers.
it is only a matter of time before another “Black Swan” event (an event that is highly unusual
and difficult to predict) occurs causing catastrophic loss.’
The report warns that while 33 per cent of large businesses report poor decision-making
as a result of spreadsheet problems, a third of the financial decision-makers using spread-
sheets in large UK businesses are still given zero training.
Source
: Adapted extract from: Burn-Callander, R. (2015) Stupid errors in spreadsheets could lead to Britain’s next
corporate disaster,
Daily Telegraph
, 7 April, www.telegraph.co.uk.
Why do you think financial accounting reports are subject to regulation, whereas man-
agement accounting reports are not?
Financial accounting reports are for external publication. To protect external users, who
depend on the quality of information provided by managers, they are subject to regulation.
Management accounting reports, on the other hand, are produced exclusively for managers
and so are for internal use only.
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