About the class - general

Understanding American financial accounting (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles - GAAP) is very useful in international business.

In Financial Accounting we learn the fundamentals of Accounting and Bookkeeping – debits and credits, financial statement formats, inventory methods, and common allocations.

In this course we look at accounting as a way of collecting, analyzing and reporting on information that is useful for managers as they make decisions. How much does a product cost us to make? How big will the budget be if we produce twice as much as we do currently? Should we close a store, a factory or a product line? How much should we charge as a transfer price to another division in our corporate group? How low can we set a price on a special order and still be profitable? These and many other questions are what Managerial Accounting aims to answer.

Lecture Style

Generally I will lecture on a topic, and we will use a textbook problem or a newspaper article to get more concrete analysis. The topics will be:

* Cost Behavior

* Standard Costs and Variance Analysis

* Inventory Valuation

* Job/Process Cost

* Pricing (Special Orders, Transfer Prices)

* Capital Investment Decisions

* Flexible Budgeting

* Activity Based Costing

Text

Most managerial accounting books are quite expensive, as they are for university courses. I will provide all materials that we use in class, but you may wish to do some outside reading.

For financial accounting, I recommend Porter and Norton, Financial Accounting (now the 3rd edition, from Pearson). A very reasonably priced edition is available at amazon.co.jp. The newest edition is the most current, but this older and less expensive one is fine for general principles.

Still, any textbook or a study guide, should be useful. I would suggest that you get a book in English so that you can more easily "think in English" about Accounting. But please note that you can get a lot out of class without a textbook.