ACCT2002 Cost Analysis for Decision Making

Trimester 2A, 2024

Syllabus

This is a management accounting foundation unit that supports managerial planning and decision making through the integration of ethics and strategy to costing models and profit planning.

Introduction

Welcome to Cost Analysis for Decision Making. The aim of this unit is to present the basic concepts and techniques in management accounting that are applied in the planning, directing, decision making, and controlling functions of an organisation. This unit will develop your analytical skills necessary for succeeding in business. In addition, you will also be exposed to ethical issues and non-financial aspects of decision making and planning.

The assessments in this unit are designed to develop your competencies in areas that have been identified as being important in your future career. The competencies that this unit will address include discipline knowledge, critical thinking and written communications. The assessments are structured such that you are required to work continuously throughout the semester. This will ensure that you are well versed in the competencies identified and the techniques required for management accounting.

In addition to developing technical proficiency, the unit has also been designed to develop and enhance your creativity, professionalism, communication, and inter-personal skills. I really do hope that you have an interesting experience.

Have a great semester!

Unit Learning Outcomes

All graduates of Curtin University achieve a set of six Graduate Capabilities during their course of study. These inform an employer that, through your studies, you have acquired discipline knowledge and a range of other skills and capabilities which employers would value in a professional setting. Each unit in your course addresses the Graduate Capabilities through a clearly identified set of learning outcomes. They form a vital part in the process referred to as assurance of learning. The learning outcomes notify you of what you are expected to know, understand or be able to do in order to be successful in this unit. Each assessment for this unit is carefully designed to test your knowledge of one or more of the unit learning outcomes. On successfully completing all of the assessments you will have achieved all of these learning outcomes.

Your course has been designed so that on graduating you will have achieved all of Curtin's Graduate Capabilities through the assurance of learning processes in each unit.

Learning Activities

Employers worldwide want graduates who have developed effective professional skills and attributes. On successful completion of this unit, students should be able to:

l Analyse ambiguous questions and develop and report on appropriate solutions; and,

l Apply management accounting techniques to different business situations that they encounter.

There is a one hour (1-hour) lecture and a two hour (2-hour) tutorial each week.

The lectures incorporate content delivery and interactive communication. The objective of each lecture is to provide you with a strong theoretical and practical grounding in the management accounting topic covered in that lecture.

Additionally, there are illustration questions which have been separately pre-recorded to take you through the analysis and resultant requirements of some module. These can be found after the respective lecture on Blackboard.

Please note that the illustration iLectures will only be available on Fridays.

Apart from the lecture, the tutorial gives students opportunities to work on various problems to develop an in-depth understanding of the materials. A tutor will cover the solution to these problems during the tutorial. It is essential that  you attend your weekly tutorials as this will give you opportunities to query any issues that you may have for the week's materials. Some questions in the tutorials will utilise Excel as this is one of the basic tools used for analysing data and deriving information in management accounting. A basic understanding and use of Excel is a key competency for graduates and you will also be assessed in your ability to use Excel.

It is also important to note that, apart from the lecture and tutorials, there are also homework questions. These are in the form. of MCQs to prepare you for the Semester Test. These homework questions can be found in module 1 to 3's

Module folder. The solutions will be released on Friday, following the end of the respective module workshops. This will allow you time to practise at the end of the week of the module tutorial. You can then go through the solutions yourself, and if you have an issue whereby you do not understand the solution, then you can ask your tutor the   following week. These questions will not be covered in class.

It is important to be aware of updates to the delivery and assessment of this unit due to COVID-19 and social distancing restrictions. Please make sure you check Oasis regularly.

Learning Resources

Library Reading List

The Reading List for this unit can be accessed through Blackboard.

Recommended texts

You do not have to purchase the following textbooks but you may like to refer to them.

l Langfield-Smith, Kim, David Smith, Paul Andon, Ronald Hilton and Helen Thorne. 2021.

Management accounting: Information for creating and managing value. 9th ed. McGraw-Hill

Education (Australia) Pty Ltd.

(ISBN/ISSN: 9781743767603)

Other resources

There is no textbook prescribed for this unit. However, there are a variety of textbooks that you can utilise, that are freely available from the university library, as well as public libraries. Main authors you should be identifying for the purposes of this unit include: