Why should I learn about cost accounting?
It may not be immediately obvious, but the way your company manages its finances, costs and budgets has a profound effect on the way projects or products are started, run and terminated. You may have been in situations where you sat back in amazement at some incomprehensible management decision and thought “what were they thinking?”
They were probably thinking about budgets and costs. You will be surprised again next time unless you learn to understand and dialogue with your CFO and cost accountants.
Fun with cost accounting
Pierre Hervouet and I have created a session that explains the basics of cost accounting (based on making and pricing cocktails) and presents three alternative views you may find useful:
- Throughput Accounting
- Lean Accounting
- Beyond Budgeting
The session doesn’t certify you as an accounting master, but it provides food for thought and pointers to plenty of material you can dig into if you want to know more. The materials (currently only in French) are published on the agilecoach site.
Join the conversation
Why don’t you go see your CFO or cost accountants today? Ask them what’s keeping them up at night. You may discover that you face much the same issues and that the solutions are similar. Yes, yes, accounting and budgeting are getting more agile, more lean!
The Agile Alliance has a new “Agile Accounting Standards” program to “Engage with FASB’s Emerging Issues Task Force to promote and develop an Agile Accounting Standard that will better define and standardize internal IT development costs for organizations that use an iterative or agile software development methodology” because “The phased gate language [of the current standard] results in significant confusion and challenges of interpreting how to map the iterative work that happens throughout an Agile project lifecycle and is becoming an increasing urgent issue.“
