The Accounting for Managerial Decisions competency focuses on knowing how and when to apply managerial accounting tools and techniques to make decisions in a business. This is the seventh in a series of eight accounting competencies and should be completed after Fundamentals of Accounting, Accounting Cycle & Transaction Analysis, Financial Reporting, Accounting for Long-Term Investing and Financing Decisions, Accounting for Working Capital, and Financial Planning and Control.

COMPETENCY OBJECTIVES

Upon successful mastery of this competency, you will be able to:

• Understand what managerial accounting is and understand the purpose of job and process costing.
• Use Activity Based Management, which is a method to identify and evaluate business activities using activity based costing (i.e., to carry out a value chain analysis or reengineering project) in order to reduce costs or improve customer value (e.g., quality).
• Understand cost behavior and cost-volume profit analysis (including break-even analysis)
• Use the total cost of ownership methodology to analyze relevant, incremental quantitative and qualitative costs of an acquisition, project, investment, or relationship (e.g., customer) to make decisions (e.g., lease/purchase and make/buy).