HI5017 Managerial Accounting Report Sample

Assignment Task:

In this reflective report, you will be discussing about your learning experience in this unit, the relevance of the unit material and assessments in the unit to your understanding of management accounting in general, and your understanding of how management accounting concepts and techniques assist managers in making decisions to real world business problems.

Specifically, you are to provide reflections or comments on each of the following:

1. Comment on what knowledge you have gained about managerial accounting and how will it be useful to you in your future? (4 marks)

2. Comment on what you learned from the individual assignment. What was interesting, what was challenging and what did you learn from it? (3 marks)

3. Comment on what you learned about the various management accounting concepts and
techniques that will assist managers in making decisions to real world business problems. What concepts and techniques you found interesting and what did you learn from it? 

Solution

Introduction

Undertaking a reflective report has emerged as an essential part of academic assignments. This is because it helps in looking back at the learning experiences of the student on various course materials, group or individual projects and overall performance throughout the semester. Based on MBA Assignment Expert This involves discussing about those learning experiences for better understanding their impact on developing relevant knowledge and skills about different concepts. The purpose of the reflective report here is to discuss about the understanding of management accounting and further explore relevant accounting concepts and techniques. It has represented how these accounting concepts can help in assisting managers in dealing with real world business problems.

Reflections

Question 1

From the unit materials I have learnt about the definition and background concept of managerial accounting. It refers to the branch of accounting enabling company management to undertake different functions like planning, budgeting, decision-making, analysis and control (Mihăilă, 2014, p1199(1)). It has helped me to understand how effective use of managerial accounting tools can lead to profitable growth and business optimization of the companies. In this regard, I have also come to know that managerial accounting provides required information to business owners and managers for analysing information resources and business results. It helps in recording both financial and non-financial information depending on the requirements of the business management (Mihăilă, 2014, p1199(2)). Thus, I have understood that this can help managers in monitoring income sources and business losses, formulating reports, analysing revenues, costs, debts, receipts, liabilities and disbursements and funding sources of business.

Understanding managerial accounting can provide me with various employment opportunities and growth and advancement in the future. Gaining education in this field will be beneficial for me in acquiring solid knowledge about different accounting practices and principles required in real-life business scenarios. Thus, I can enhance my employability for applying to responsible accounting positions in the industry. Managerial accounting is also significantly relevant to my business major and future career for becoming a management accounting. With this avid knowledge, I can also shift my job position to financial manager in the future by having experience in analysing accounting information and financial statements (Appelbaum et al, 2017, p29(2)). I will also be able to undertake various operational decisions as a future financial manager, thereby improving the operational efficiency of the company and helping in its investment decisions. Therefore, it is an essential part for building my accounting knowledge and contributing towards my professional development.

Question 2

In the individual assignment, we were required to answer both qualitative and quantitative questions. The qualitative questions were mainly based on accounting principles and practices, different cost control techniques, budgeting and investment appraisal. These questions evaluated my conceptual knowledge about those different managerial accounting concepts. In this regard, I came to identify my own strengths, weaknesses and areas of improvement. Exploring different cost control and budgeting techniques was particularly interesting for me. I also found it fascinating to understand how accounting principles are undertaken in companies by going through their annual report. However, I faced some difficulties in the area of investment appraisal techniques. This made me realize that I should focus more on gaining in depth knowledge and enhance my concepts in this area. I also need to clarify my doubts in this section from my accounting professor. Furthermore, I also completed quantitative questions that focused on undertaking ratio analysis of a company. This task was extensively beneficial for me as I got the chance of analysing financial statement of the case study company. I retrieved relevant information for computing ratios like current ratio, return on assets, net profit, debt to equity ratio and others (Islam, 2014, p122(5)). It helped me to learn about how to analyse liquidity, debt and profit position of a company. Thus, this assignment helped me to clear various theoretical concepts of managerial accounting that I can further apply in the future.

Question 3

During the entire course, I have learnt about various managerial concepts that have gained my interest and will be beneficial for my in the future. One such interesting and practical concept is budgeting, trend analysis and forecasting. Budgeting helps in identifying deviations of actual outcomes from the budgeted ones to enable managers in making appropriate changes (Cardoş, 2014, p484(2)). It can help in making various capital expenditure decisions for financial managers in the company. Trend analysis displays unusual variations and deviations in certain expenses, customer tendencies, sales volumes and others. Forecasting is useful for predicting future financial information. This concept of budgeting, trend analysis and forecasting will be useful for me in making various financial decisions in the future.

Furthermore, cash flow analysis is another important concept that will be beneficial for me for making a career as a financial and accounting manager. This analysis helps in analysing the cash impact of various business decisions by recording financial information based on accounting principles and practices (Soboleva et al 2018, p2-35(1)). I have come to learn that the fundamental objective of cash flow analysis is to ensure that a company has adequate liquid assets for covering its short-term obligations. Thus, this concept will be useful for me in the future for identifying inflow and outflow of cash in the company.

In addition, the concept of traditional performance measurement system has been of interest for me. It helped me to understand how strategies and plans are communicated in the organizations by aligning them with employee goals. It has also enabled me to comprehend the process of tracking performance against targets and accordingly, rewarding employees. Thus, this will be useful for me in the future for evaluating my own performance in the organization.

Conclusion

The reflective report aimed at discussing about various managerial accounting concepts that I learnt during my course. In this regard, I pointed out how I gain knowledge about the definition of managerial accounting and understood its usefulness in managerial and business decision-making. The report also portrayed the challenges and areas of interest that I experienced while undertaking the individual project on managerial accounting. In addition, I reviewed some of the concepts that were particular of interest for me and analysed how they can help me in the future. 

References

Appelbaum, D., Kogan, A., Vasarhelyi, M. and Yan, Z. (2017) Impact of business analytics and enterprise systems on managerial accounting, International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, 25, pp.29-44, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1467089517300490 

Cardoş, I.R. (2014), New trends in budgeting–a literature review, SEA–Practical Application of Science, 2(04), pp.483-489, https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=743277 

Islam, M.A. (2014), An analysis of the financial performance of national bank limited using financial ratio, Journal of Behavioural Economics, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Accounting and Transport, 2(5), pp.121-129, https://www.academia.edu/download/53799376/thesis_111.pdf 

Mihăilă, M. (2014) Managerial accounting and decision making, in energy industry, Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 109, pp.1199-1202, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1877042813052518 

Soboleva, Y.P., Matveev, V.V., Ilminskaya, S.A., Efimenko, I.S., Rezvyakova, I.V. and Mazur, L.V. (2018), Monitoring of businesses operations with cash flow analysis. International Journal of Civil Engineering and Technology, 9(11), pp.2034-2044, http://www.fa.ru/fil/orel/science/nir/Documents/Matveev+%20Scopus.pdf