anyone interested in management accounting (1 Viewer)

[turtleface]

I noticed most of us are Financial Accounting/Audit/Public Accounting aspirants.

Is anyone interested in management accounting?

Ironically, judging by CA/CPA/CMA/CIMA course content it seems management accounting is more related to "Finance" than Financial Accounting is.

For instance in management accounting post grad programs you have to stuff like risk management, financial planning and analysis, debt/equity structuring, budgeting

It's also more value adding and it seems in the U.S. a CMA earns about 10K more on average than a CPA. I think its similar in Australia.

Doesn't seem to get much mention though...not sure why. Maybe its cause you never know what you get with a management accountant. They could be someone who's worked for 1 year who's never gotten a CA/CPA or they could be the effective CFO lol.

 

[seremify007]

I'm considering it as the next step after audit- but who's to say where I'll be in ten years time.

I'm not quite sure how management accounting works in terms of what qualifications you need, but I know quite a few people do move into that area after working in audit for a while. I know there are some very anti-audit people here on BoS, but no matter how you look at it, you can't deny that audit does help if you want to move into other specialised forms of accounting.

 

[jpr333]

There's a lot of money in mgt acct, get in a big frim and your prospects would look good. Financial accounting has jack to do with finance really, financial accounting is basically compliance with accounting standards when preparing reports, mgt acct is concerned with internal non-accounting firm number crunching/management. Our lecturer said this of mgt accounting "you'll make get further learning to play golf and following rugby than you ever will doing more accounting" heh (think he was excluding the CA qualification though, well you would hope so..).

 

[mr_shittles]

I noticed most of us are Financial Accounting/Audit/Public Accounting aspirants.

Is anyone interested in management accounting?

Ironically, judging by CA/CPA/CMA/CIMA course content it seems management accounting is more related to "Finance" than Financial Accounting is.

For instance in management accounting post grad programs you have to stuff like risk management, financial planning and analysis, debt/equity structuring, budgeting

It's also more value adding and it seems in the U.S. a CMA earns about 10K more on average than a CPA. I think its similar in Australia.

Doesn't seem to get much mention though...not sure why. Maybe its cause you never know what you get with a management accountant. They could be someone who's worked for 1 year who's never gotten a CA/CPA or they could be the effective CFO lol.

Yeah, I'm interesting in going back to management accounting one day . . . I think jeff thinks I'm one of those "anti-audit people" . . . . having worked in both audit and managment accounting, I really liked management accounting much more. At uni, I enjoyed management accounting too . . . I was a huge fan of 2a and 3b and might even go back to tutor them.

I agree that management accounting is more value-adding, but you need financial accountants to produce the information that management accountants rely on. And yes, jeff, we need auditors to review that information to make sure they're compliant with the accounting standards and that the disclosure levels are appropriate.

For management accountants, the more favoured qualification is CPA . . . when I worked in a management accounting role, my manager was a CPA, the person he reported to (regional financial controller) was a CPA and the VP of Finance (it was an American firm so that's the fancy title the Group CFO gets) was a CPA equivalent.

I worked in financial planning and analysis, and I got some very good exposure to people who ran the business. I notice that in your post you point out that CMAs earn 10k more than CPAs . . not sure about that statement. I know in Australia, CAs used to command a substantial pay premium to CPAs, however that premium has eroded substantially over time, and I think the gap is actually very small.

These days heaps of many CAs work in management accounting roles, but they are still outnumbered like 4 to 1 by CPAs . . . (25,000 CAs vs. 108,000 CPAs)

 

[jpr333]

Actually I could say I worked some basically management accounting in the summer break at an engineering firm, primarily using excel to sort out accounts and fixing the system for finacial information they had recently implemented (a tier level 2 solution). And it wasn't bad, quite interesting really, work wasn't too tough and the boss had the same kinda background.

 

[seremify007]

Yeah, I'm interesting in going back to management accounting one day . . . I think jeff thinks I'm one of those "anti-audit people" . . . . having worked in both audit and managment accounting, I really liked management accounting much more. At uni, I enjoyed management accounting too . . . I was a huge fan of 2a and 3b and might even go back to tutor them.

Haha no you aren't in that category. The "anti-audit" group is largely comprised of people who think Big4 audit is only for people who couldn't make it into anything else (ie they are only doing it because they didn't get any other opportunities).

 

[turtleface]

Haha no you aren't in that category. The "anti-audit" group is largely comprised of people who think Big4 audit is only for people who couldn't make it into anything else (ie they are only doing it because they didn't get any other opportunities).

lol I've come to realise lately that most of the anti-audit/anti-big4 brigade have either been rejected from big4 or are lame single finance majors who can't even get into the big4/audit even if they wanted to.

 

[AppleXY]

lol I've come to realise lately that most of the anti-audit/anti-big4 brigade have either been rejected from big4 or are lame single finance majors who can't even get into the big4/audit even if they wanted to.

LMAO! haha