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janette28
Jul 15, 2009, 08:53 AM
I need to know what is manufactured accounting and is there a guideline to use when doing manufactured accounting.

morgaine300
Jul 15, 2009, 09:24 PM
Manufactured accounting? Are we manufacturing accounting now?

Sorry...

I assume you mean accounting for the manufacturing business, which is mostly what cost accounting is about. Managerial accounting is roughly the same thing, depending on who you ask. Obviously cost methods can be used for non-manufacturing, but that's usually how it's taught and where much of it is applied.

If that's what you're talking about, it's a whole sub-field of accounting, so no there isn't "a" guideline, because you're talking about lots and lots of different stuff.

Cost accounting is basically a lot of internal work. Financial accounting is taking everything that has actually happened in the company and putting it together and making statements for outside users. Cost accounting is dealing with internal cost-related things and is for inside users like the managers. Applied to manufacturing, it would be knowing the costs of the manufacturing process and how to analyze them, so that you can do junk like finding ways to cut costs and determine selling prices and that sort of thing. It also involves budgeting and analyzing actual costs against a budget. It can get into divisional stuff. It can involve making decisions between going one route and another route (or doing versus not doing something). All of those things can involve lots of details about the costs of stuff.

It also doesn't contain as many "rules" as financial accounting. In other words, we're not deciding whether something was supposed to be recognized as revenue based on some criteria that FASB set forth. (Though there are a lot of traditional commonalities.) It's very math oriented so some of it just is what it is, but how you interpret it can be very opinionated. And the reports done are how the users want them done rather than following a laid-out set of rules.