Changes in the competitive landscape and a globalising world economy have had major effects on the theory and practice of management accounting. In the last two decades, there have been significant changes in thinking about the role of management accounting in organisations. Once it was sufficient to describe management accounting as being concerned with providing information for planning and control and for decision making. However, the role of management accounting has evolved and it is now concerned with the theories and practices that enable the effective use of organisational resources, to support managers in enhancing customer and shareholder value. Understanding how to design and implement contemporary cost management techniques or performance measurement systems requires an intimate knowledge of the nature of the business, its markets, its corporate strategies and its people. Over the last two decades, the practice of management accounting has developed to become more a part of the process of management and less a part of the practice of accounting.

Unlike financial accounting, there are no accounting standards or legally enforceable practices and few widely publicised debates over appropriate accounting practice. Management accounting takes place within organisations and can be quite specific to each business. Also, to understand the nature of management accounting practice we need to understand the broader aspects of business practice, across a range of areas including strategy, marketing, human resource management, operations management and organisational behaviour.

This book is aimed at students undertaking an introductory or intermediate course in Management Accounting. The book may also be used in Certificate in the Theory of Accounting (CTA) equivalent courses. The book includes an extensive bank of questions from professional examinations including CMA, ACCA, and CIMA and includes many of the questions from the Qualifying Examination (QE) set by the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) in recent years. Due to the integrated nature of many of the SAICA questions and some of the CIMA and ACCA questions, we have included these questions in a separate chapter and have included an index to assist lecturers to select questions from this chapter. Questions in each chapter are graded in terms of theory, short questions, longer problems and case studies.

The book includes many real world examples of management accounting applied by South African companies and the public sector which offers students an insight into how theory is applied in practice.

Whilst the book is based on the US text, Managerial Accounting, by Ronald Hilton, and the Australian adaptation by Kim Langfield-Smith and Helen Thorne, the South African adaptation includes information that is relevant to the South African economy and uses real life examples from South African companies. The use of QE questions set by SAICA also makes the book more relevant for South African students.

Carlos Correia