Advantages and Disadvantages of Historical Cost Accounting

The historical cost accounting values an asset for balance sheet purposes at the price paid for the asset at the time of its acquisition.The historical cost accounting is the situation in which accountants record revenue, expenditure and asset acquisition and disposal at historical cost: that is, the actual amounts of money, or money’s worth, received or paid to complete the transaction. Historical cost principle means that assets and liabilities are recorded at their actual historical cost. When an asset is written off, the loss is recorded as the historical cost of the asset less any accumulated depreciation. Typically, the asset would be fully depreciated and thus no loss recorded but this isn’t always the case. If the asset is sold Continue reading

Important Characteristics of Financial Information

The financial statement should contain information sufficient in quantity and quality to satisfy the reasonable expectations of the readers to whom it is addressed. According to the above statement, it is means that the financial statement should contain useful and meaningful information which included quantity and quality so that the reader who we make the financial statement to the person knows and understand it. How we achieve the quality information? The four important characteristics of financial information are understandability, relevance, reliability, and comparability. First, understandability is including taking into consideration users’ abilities, and aggregation and classification of information. Relevance is including having predictive value and confirmatory value. Next, Reliability is including faithful representation, being natural, free form material error, complete, Continue reading

Financial Accounting and Management Accounting – Similarities and Differences

Financial accounting and management accounting play an important part in accounting information system. They co-exist in enterprise production and operation of management, constituting the modern enterprise accounting system together. Much information which management accounting required is from financial accounting, while financial accounting also put the established budget, standards organizations, and such daily accounting data from management accounting as the basic premise. Management accounting is used primarily by those within a company or organization. Reports can be generated for any period of time such as daily, weekly or monthly. Reports are considered to be “future looking” and have forecasting value to those within the company.  Main function of management accounting in the enterprise is to establish a variety of internal accounting Continue reading

Process Costing – Definition, Steps and Charactristics

In accounting, process costing is a method of assigning production costs to units of output. In process costing systems, production costs are not traced to individual units of output. Costs are assigned first to production departments and then to units of output as they move through the departments. The process costing method is typically used for processes that produce large quantities of homogeneous products. The process costing method is in contrast to other costing methods, such as product costing, job costing, or operation costing systems. Using the process costing method is optimal under certain conditions. If the output products are homogeneous, that is, the units of output are relatively indistinguishable from one another, it may be beneficial to use process Continue reading

Differences Between Value Chain Analysis and Traditional Management Accounting

The Limitations of Traditional Management Accounting There exist five major limitation for traditional management accounting. The first one is the traditional management accounting may treat the firm as a single part. It only provided information for a single enterprise management decision and control, ignoring the external environment and other relevant information also can reflect the firm’s position in the market. Second, the traditional management accounting limited to the collection and analysis of internal financial information, the information break away from the requirements of corporate strategic management and weakened the role of management accounting. Third, the concept of traditional management accounting just focus on solving the relevant and individual internal issues. It can not form a sound management system with the Continue reading

What is a Master Budget?

Budget provides comprehensive financial overview of planned company operation. A company’s objectives budget is the overall financial plan showing expenditure of the available funds. A company’s budget is driven by the aims and objectives of the company as well as what it can actually accomplish. Many variables in a business can be budgeted which includes sales, output, cost- (variable and fixed), profits, cash flow, capital investment. Budget should be SMART, that is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and with time bound otherwise budget will be ineffective. Strategic objective of the company is the first factor that needs to be considered when formulating budgets because unaligned budget with strategic objective lead to failure. The next step of budgeting is identifying the limiting Continue reading