Cost Accounting
The cost accounting course would be one of my least favorite courses. After taking two accounting courses before this one I felt lost when it came to cost accounting. I hope I can help others not be as lost by giving some insight to the course of cost accounting.
To start of with a student should know what cost accounting is. Cost accounting evaluates the overall cost of running a business.
Within a cost accounting course a student will learn about job order cost system and process cost system, direct and indirect costs, cost allocation, cost-volume profit (CVP), variance analysis, pricing decisions and budgeting.
Cost allocation different components that make it up. While a student is learning about cost allocation he will learn about activity-based costing(ABC) system and cost drivers.
The section of cost-volume profit (CVP) will go into details of fixed, mixed, and variable costs and how to prepare income statement using both variable and absorption costing.
While learning of variance analysis the student will learn about standard costing, price, usage, and overhead variances, and over applied and under applied overhead variances. I had been working at my job for a couple of years and I was just getting into reading the profit lost statement when I took this class. This section helped me understand certain parts of the statement better.
Pricing decisions and budgeting is where the student learns about an operating budget and financial budget. Budgets was by far my favorite part of this class. I hope this gives you some insight before you sit down to your first cost accounting class.