7 Best Management Accounting Books Ever Written

Are you looking for ways to cut costs and improve profit margins? In this article, we will create the list of best management accounting books you should read.

What is Management Accounting?

Management accounting or managerial accounting is one of the most powerful tools for managers at all levels to control the rising costs. In contrary to financial accounting which focuses on external reporting, management accounting provides you with costing data that help you to make the right decision at the right time. the typical management accounting books will explain fundamental concepts such as,

- Basic cost management concepts

- Various product costing concepts such as activity-based costing, target costing, job order costing and so on

- Activity analysis

- Cost estimation

- Capital budgeting and sales forecasting

With true cost knowledge, a typical operations manager will be able to find ways to reduce costs and improve service.

In Search of the Best Management Accounting Books

A reader who takes care of the transportation function would like to reduce transportation-related costs. So he asks us for a suggestion about a book on management accounting. We explore the book landscape, then we collect data as below,

- We check out the list of top business school rankings based US News report.

- We select top 10 business schools specializing in accountancy, namely, NYU Stern, US Marshall, Stanford, UIUC, Umich, Mccombs, Wharton, UNCC, Chicago Booth and BYU.

- After that, we visit each school's website and check the management accounting syllabus.

- We try to find out which book is listed as required reading.

- We also consider a non-traditional book if it is listed as the supplementary reading materials.

- We finalize the list of managerial accounting books based on citation counts.

7 Best Management Accounting Books are as below:

1. Managerial Accounting by Ray Garrison, Eric Noreen and Peter Brewer


2. Cost Accounting by Charles T. Horngren, Srikant M. Datar and Madhav V. Rajan


3. Managerial Accounting: Creating Value in a Dynamic Business Environment by Ronald W. Hilton and David E. Platt


4. Accounting: Tools for Business Decision Making by Paul D. Kimmel, Jerry J. Weygandt and Donald E. Kieso


5. Schaum's Outline of Managerial Accounting by Jae Shim and Joel Siegel


6. Management Accounting: Information for Decision-Making and Strategy Execution by Anthony A. Atkinson, Robert S. Kaplan, Ella Mae Matsumura and S. Mark Young


7. Managerial Accounting: An Introduction to Concepts, Methods and Uses by Michael W. Maher, Clyde P. Stickney and Roman L. Weil

Have you ever read any management accounting books listed here?

Reference
- Kaplan, R. S. (1984). The evolution of management accounting. In Readings in accounting for management control (pp. 586-621). Springer, Boston, MA.

Last review and update: June 17, 2019

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