Advanced Cost Accounting
Advanced Cost Accounting
OBJECTIVES
- Create a greater cost awareness
- Describe advanced cost analysis techniques
- Select the costing measurement system that works
- Discuss real case studies
- Illustrate the features of the Activity-analysis philosophy
- Discuss the linkages between activity-based costing and management
- Provide insight into the fastest-growing and least visible elements of cost-overhead
- Improve profitability by monitoring cost and performance
- Describe the importance of transfer pricing
- Improve the effectiveness of budgeting by identifying the cost/performance relationship of different service levels
- Encourage continuous improvement and total quality management because planning and control are directed at process level
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
- Anyone who requires a refresher on the topic, along with professionals who have direct financial responsibilities
- Personnel from every business discipline who need to know more about business budgeting, costing terms and techniques and who may have to plan, cost and budget new business ventures, or who wish to consider new ideas and methods
- This is particularly beneficial to newly appointed personnel on a fast-track development
COURSE OUTLINE
DAY 1 – Review of key cost concepts
- The issue of “costing”
- Creating cost-aware organizations
- Review of some key cost concepts
- Product vs. Period costs
- Absorption (Full) vs. Variable costing
- Cost behavior: Fixed and Variable Costs
- Direct and Indirect Costs
DAY 2 – Activity-based analysis: from costing to management
- Under-costing and over-costing: the consequences for profitability
- How to refine a costing system?
- Activity-based costing (ABC) and cost-management
- Cost hierarchy & Cost drivers
- Linking resources, activities and management
- Introducing Activity-based management (ABM)
- Linkages between ABM and ABC – monitoring value creation
DAY 3 – Costing, Flexible Budgets and Variance Analysis
- From costing to budget: interpreting variances
- Define the master budget and explain its major benefits to an organization
- Describe the difference between a static budget and a flexible budget
- Compute flexible-budget variances and sales-volume variances (level 1 variances)
- Compute the price and efficiency variances for direct-cost categories (level 2 variances)
- Explain why standard costs are often used in variance analysis
- Integrate continuous improvement into variance analysis
DAY 4 – Target costing and transfer pricing
- Linking process development to costing
- Target costing and its implications
- Target costing and its implications
- Decentralized organisations
- Cost/Profit/Investment centers
- Transfer-pricing issues
- Linkages with performance evaluation
DAY 5 – Beyond compliance: the role of finance for integrated governance
- What is the actual role of Finance?
- Compliance and Corporate Governance
- Beyond compliance: the role of performance and knowledge
- Costs, budgets and variance analysis as tools for communications
- Beyond budgeting: integrating financial and non-financial issues
- Six-sigma and the “integrated governance scorecard” ™