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Management Accounting
For upper level undergraduate and MBA Management Accounting courses. Atkinson is a managerially-oriented book that focuses on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of classical and contemporary managerial accounting.
Hardcover
First published October 1, 1994
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
November 25, 2024
out of all accounting textbooks ive ever interacted with, this was by far the most awfully written and horribly organized textbook ive encountered, and that's probably why a satanic professor would assign it to his students
0 stars
0 stars
September 3, 2012
great one
May 26, 2014
its awesum
March 21, 2022
(While this listing is for the fifth edition, my review is actually for the sixth edition -- not that anyone reading this will care.)
In my accelerated Managerial Accounting class, we managed to cover every chapter of this 500-page book in seven weeks, which isn't uncommon in an MBA program, but definitely factors into my review, as my assessment was based on my ability to learn as many of the concepts as possible while reading and studying an average of 10+ pages a day. For the most part, I walked away with an abundance of new knowledge. While I likely won't ever hold a job that forces me to practice and sharpen these skills, it gave me insight into not only how complex every monetary decision is in a company (answer: however complicated you'd imagine it would be, times a hundred), and how companies can actually ruin their financials while still understanding the fundamentals and not making errors or committing known fraud. For example, the cost to produce a product can be calculated simply as an aggregate of every material, labor hour, and overhead cost that went into it. Or, you can factor out unused machine time, labor breaks and vacations, and fixed/variable costs to help you make smarter decisions about adding, removing, or purchasing new products. The level of granularity allows you to make more informed decisions while also showing that the concept of "cost" is somewhat arbitrary and subjective.
It was a lot to cover, and while I passed the class with high grades, our final exam covered nearly every chapter of the book. Even as an open-book exam, it was hard to locate some of the specific sections I wanted to reference to find my work. Beyond that, there were some problems we were asked to solve that didn't have specific equations or one-to-one examples in the text. Often, you learn the concepts, but have to figure out how to reapply them in different manners at the end of the chapter, which is great if you want a challenge, but frustrating when you're trying to just grasp whether or not you're applying the right logic. (Beyond that, our professor gave us full points just for attempting the problems, whether they were right or wrong. He did give us the solutions after the due dates, but it didn't help me to understand how he knew which concepts we were to apply, let alone where in the book or lectures we were supposed to refer to.)
All in all, for being published ten years ago, it's the kind of book you'd want in an accounting class, with a variety of examples, a broad array of fascinating topics that apply to just about any workplace, and a mostly approachable writing style. If I were an entrepreneur, I would hold onto this book and refer back to it as I built my company's accounting best practices. And while I found it challenging at times to self-teach myself some of the concepts, it was successful more often than it was not. As someone who struggled in a financial accounting class 20 years ago in undergrad, I appreciated a textbook that helped me slay my accounting demons well enough, and feel more comfortable with numbers than I did seven weeks ago.
In my accelerated Managerial Accounting class, we managed to cover every chapter of this 500-page book in seven weeks, which isn't uncommon in an MBA program, but definitely factors into my review, as my assessment was based on my ability to learn as many of the concepts as possible while reading and studying an average of 10+ pages a day. For the most part, I walked away with an abundance of new knowledge. While I likely won't ever hold a job that forces me to practice and sharpen these skills, it gave me insight into not only how complex every monetary decision is in a company (answer: however complicated you'd imagine it would be, times a hundred), and how companies can actually ruin their financials while still understanding the fundamentals and not making errors or committing known fraud. For example, the cost to produce a product can be calculated simply as an aggregate of every material, labor hour, and overhead cost that went into it. Or, you can factor out unused machine time, labor breaks and vacations, and fixed/variable costs to help you make smarter decisions about adding, removing, or purchasing new products. The level of granularity allows you to make more informed decisions while also showing that the concept of "cost" is somewhat arbitrary and subjective.
It was a lot to cover, and while I passed the class with high grades, our final exam covered nearly every chapter of the book. Even as an open-book exam, it was hard to locate some of the specific sections I wanted to reference to find my work. Beyond that, there were some problems we were asked to solve that didn't have specific equations or one-to-one examples in the text. Often, you learn the concepts, but have to figure out how to reapply them in different manners at the end of the chapter, which is great if you want a challenge, but frustrating when you're trying to just grasp whether or not you're applying the right logic. (Beyond that, our professor gave us full points just for attempting the problems, whether they were right or wrong. He did give us the solutions after the due dates, but it didn't help me to understand how he knew which concepts we were to apply, let alone where in the book or lectures we were supposed to refer to.)
All in all, for being published ten years ago, it's the kind of book you'd want in an accounting class, with a variety of examples, a broad array of fascinating topics that apply to just about any workplace, and a mostly approachable writing style. If I were an entrepreneur, I would hold onto this book and refer back to it as I built my company's accounting best practices. And while I found it challenging at times to self-teach myself some of the concepts, it was successful more often than it was not. As someone who struggled in a financial accounting class 20 years ago in undergrad, I appreciated a textbook that helped me slay my accounting demons well enough, and feel more comfortable with numbers than I did seven weeks ago.
August 27, 2018
This book is brutal. Incomprehensible AF.
May 31, 2015
This is a really terrible book, in my opinion. First of all, it is extremely messy and hard to follow. There are so many topics included in this book, which are fundamentally different from one another (costing theories, customer management, budgeting, etc.) that one can just split the contents into several independent books.
The contents is ordered in a somewhat bizarre way - there's an introduction to the subject, then it starts with budgeting and strategy, goes through the different costing systems, then jumps to customer management, then motivation and ethics, and then goes through budgeting once again only to finish with financial control. I see absolutely no clear purpose of including all of this into a single book (or course) - except, of course, confusing the hell out of the reader (or the student).
The next thing I didn't particularly like is the style of the language used to write this book. English is my second language and I do happen to read quite a lot in English (books, articles, etc.), but never have I read at such a slow pace as I did with this book! It is hard to keep concentrated, the vocabulary used is rather pretentious, the charts only lead to a further confusion instead of helping you to grasp the main points. The black-and-blue colours are not helping either, making the material even more boring to look at. And mind you, some of the theories included are quite interesting, but they were made to seem quite dull by the author.
Finally, as I happen to not have the newest version, I would like to point out that in the newest version the same exercises (with same descriptions and tasks) are included, however, the numbers are slightly different. This is extremely frustrating when I try to compare my solutions to the ones provided by my course instructor. Due to the differences in the numbers I have to spend double the amount of time just to check if I got everything correctly. I wonder why this was done? Of all the things which could have been changed in an updated edition, why choose to do this? Perhaps the aim of this action was to make sure that students will not be able to buy the book second hand so they will have to get the new one? Asking for $$$ from students in a such a low manner disgusts me!
The contents is ordered in a somewhat bizarre way - there's an introduction to the subject, then it starts with budgeting and strategy, goes through the different costing systems, then jumps to customer management, then motivation and ethics, and then goes through budgeting once again only to finish with financial control. I see absolutely no clear purpose of including all of this into a single book (or course) - except, of course, confusing the hell out of the reader (or the student).
The next thing I didn't particularly like is the style of the language used to write this book. English is my second language and I do happen to read quite a lot in English (books, articles, etc.), but never have I read at such a slow pace as I did with this book! It is hard to keep concentrated, the vocabulary used is rather pretentious, the charts only lead to a further confusion instead of helping you to grasp the main points. The black-and-blue colours are not helping either, making the material even more boring to look at. And mind you, some of the theories included are quite interesting, but they were made to seem quite dull by the author.
Finally, as I happen to not have the newest version, I would like to point out that in the newest version the same exercises (with same descriptions and tasks) are included, however, the numbers are slightly different. This is extremely frustrating when I try to compare my solutions to the ones provided by my course instructor. Due to the differences in the numbers I have to spend double the amount of time just to check if I got everything correctly. I wonder why this was done? Of all the things which could have been changed in an updated edition, why choose to do this? Perhaps the aim of this action was to make sure that students will not be able to buy the book second hand so they will have to get the new one? Asking for $$$ from students in a such a low manner disgusts me!
October 3, 2013
Magnificent
September 22, 2024
4/10
-In depth review of balanced scorecard approach of management and cost accounting practices
-Chapter lengths are wildly inconsistent; would benefit from reorganizing
-Required textbook for MBA
-In depth review of balanced scorecard approach of management and cost accounting practices
-Chapter lengths are wildly inconsistent; would benefit from reorganizing
-Required textbook for MBA
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews