ACCT 4251: Advanced Management Accounting
Building on ACCT 3251: Intermediate Management Accounting, students explore the integrative and interdisciplinary role of management accounting and its contribution to the strategic management process. Students discuss the provision of quantitative and non-quantitative information for planning, control, and decision making. Topics include costing systems; allocating costs and revenues including support service costs, fixed costs, joint product costs, bundled product revenues, and customer profitability; management information systems; the importance of budgeting; the importance of variance analysis; capital budgeting and investment decision making; quality issues and supply chain strategies; transfer pricing; performance measurement; compensation issues; and strategic processes and balanced scorecards.
Learning outcomes
On successful completion of the course, students will be able to:
- Apply management accounting concepts in a case-based, collaborative setting, communicating the results effectively both orally and in writing.
- Locate the role of management control systems (MCS) in both strategy and operations.
- Describe results control and its applications.
- Distinguish indirect controls from the direct controls, based on action and personnel/culture.
- Determine whether an entity or an area is better suited to tight or loose controls, and the types of action and/or personnel/cultural controls that ensure the desired level of tightness.
- Design and evaluate management controls in terms of methods applied and tightness, and the indirect costs of a poor MCS design and/or implementation.
- Select the best type of financial responsibility-centre, based on desired levels of control, and identify behavioural impacts of different transfer pricing schemes.
- Prepare and interpret budgets, and identify their limitations.
- Design and evaluate various types of incentive systems.
- Evaluate financial performance market and accounting measures in terms of seven criteria to determine optimal performance metrics.
- Critically analyze corporate governance structures of various companies and common management-control related ethical issues.
- Assess the ways that performance evaluators can reduce, and perhaps eliminate, the distorting effects of uncontrollable factors on measuring performance.
- Analyze and apply six financial results control remedies to alleviate myopic behaviour.
Course topics
Introduction to Case-Based Collaboration
- Module 1: Introduction to Case-Based Collaboration
Control Function
- Module 2: Introduction to Management Control Systems (MCS)
Control Alternatives and Effects
- Module 3: Control Alternatives and Effects--Results Controls
- Module 4: Action and Personnel/Cultural Controls
- Module 5: Control System Tightness
- Module 6: Control System Design, Evaluation, and Indirect Costs
Financial Results Control Systems
- Module 7: Financial Responsibility Centres and Transfer Pricing
- Module 8: Planning and Budgeting (Performance Definition and Measurement)
- Module 9: Incentive Systems (Performance Rewards)
Performance Measurement and Issues
- Module 10: Financial Performance Measures
- Module 11: Corporate Governance and Ethics
- Module 12: Controls and Risk
- Module 13: The Myopia Problem
Required text and materials
Merchant, K. A, Wim A. Van der Stede, (2017). Management Control Systems: Performance
Measurement, Evaluation and Incentives. 4th ed. Pearson Education Canada.
Textbook,
ISBN: 1292110554
Assessments
Please be aware that should your course have a final exam, you are responsible for the fee to the online proctoring service, ProctorU, or to the in-person approved Testing Centre. Please contact exams@tru.ca with any questions about this.
To successfully complete this course, students must achieve a passing grade of 50% or higher on the overall course, and 50% or higher on the final mandatory exam.
| Case Assignment 1: Leo’s Four-Plex Theater | 6% |
| Case Assignment 2: Axeon N.V. | 12% |
| Case Assignment 3: Zumwald AG | 12% |
| Case Assignment 4: Entropic Communications Inc. | 12% |
| Case Writing Assignment | 28% |
| Final Exam* | 30% |
| Total | 100% |
* Mandatory
Open Learning Faculty Member Information
An Open Learning Faculty Member is available to assist students. Students will receive the necessary contact information at the start of the course.
