Management accounting

What brought this topic to mind is actually one of my doctoral classes.

I'm currently taking a class called Accounting for Managers, and we've been studying financial statements, how to interpret them, and how they influence business decisions.

I'm learning to read actual annual reports from large companies like Instacart, Target, and Costco.

And as I'm going through this material, I keep thinking to myself, wow, I wish I had understood all of this when we first started our business.

in.

When I took my accounting coursework to get my CPA, there was a course called Managerial Accounting.

I was excited to get into that because I like the idea of doing controller work, doing CFO type work.

I didn't see myself as an auditor.

And it was cost accounting.

Old school cost accounting, right? Like we're in a factory and we're making widgets and we are allocating, you know, overhead, indirect, all this stuff to, like, figure out what's the cost to make our widget, you know, and then stuff like, OK, should we optimize this part of the production line? Like, how can we optimize it or whatever? That sort of thing.

But that is not what managerial accounting is these days, is it?

Well, look, what you described is very much where management accounting had its roots and it's important work, no question about it.