Advanced Cost Accounting
Course Description
This course covers cost-volume-profit analysis, costing systems, activity-based costing, flexible budgets and variances, inventory costing methods, cost behavior, and cost allocation.
Topics and Objectives
Cost Concepts and Product Costing
- Assess the role of cost accounting in business planning, control, and decision making.
- Assess the role of ethics in cost accounting.
- Compare and contrast various cost classifications, including related behaviors and drivers.
- Compare and contrast variable and absorption costing methods.
- Apply job-order costing in appropriate situations.
Activity-Based Management
- Calculate costs using activity-based costing (ABC) with incomplete information.
- Analyze profitability using customer level data.
- Analyze strategies to measure and manage productivity and capacity.
Cost Allocation/Estimation and Process Costing
- Compare and contrast various cost allocation methods.
- Apply various cost estimation methods for dealing with incomplete information.
- Apply process costing in appropriate situations.
Planning and Decision Making
- Perform single product and multiproduct cost-volume-profit (CVP) analyses.
- Evaluate the development of strategic value creation opportunities using the Theory of Constraints (TOC).
- Analyze the role of cost control systems in strategic planning.
Cost Management
- Compare and contrast various approaches to benchmarking for business planning and control.
- Evaluate static and flexible budgets using variance analysis.
- Compare and contrast various approaches for measuring a division's income and invested capital.
Performance Evaluation Systems
- Evaluate financial and nonfinancial performance measures.
- Evaluate the implementation of strategic value creation opportunities using a balanced scorecard.
- Analyze behavioral issues that can arise as a result of performance measurement systems.
- Integrate the business life-cycle approach in cost accounting system performance.