Management accounting: retrospect and prospect

This book is part of the celebrations to mark CIMA’s 90th anniversary in 2009. It looks at the development of cost and management accounting from the founding of the Institute to today. It considers a number of immediate challenges to management accountants and surveys a range of issues and challenges that will likely affect management accounting thought and practice in the future. The authors examine the possibilities for accountants to widen their focus and become more familiar with the enterprise technology determining their organisations’ cost structures and with the effects of multiple production in various locations, such as economies or diseconomies of scale. Such change may require the alteration of traditional cost models used by accountants to become more nuanced. The book suggests how this may be accomplished and highlights the need for management accountants to work as part of management teams throughout the organisation as business partners rather than remain grounded in specialist information provision roles