IMA Detroit Chapter September Virtual Meeting
September 21, 2021
6PM to 7:30PM
Session Title
Things They Forget to Teach Management Accountants in School
Session Description
Despite the fact that most accounting students spend their careers in industry, the accounting curriculum at most universities is designed to prepare students for careers in public accounting. As a consequence, they emphasize the financial accounting uses of cost information and how cost accounting can be given a “managerial emphasis.” The result is that people view managerial costing as simply the use of cost accounting to support management in its decision-making processes. That, however, is far from the truth. There is a vast difference between the two. In this session, Doug Hicks will share many of the lessons he’s learned during the half-century he’s spent in the managerial accounting arena as both a controller and a successful managerial costing consultant. He’ll touch on both the fundamental differences between cost and managerial accounting and many of the specific areas in which traditional cost accounting fails to provide management with the accurate and relevant economic information it needs to make quality business decisions.
Speaker Bio
After working sixteen years in public accounting and industry, Doug Hicks has spent the past thirty-six years as managerial costing consultant during which he’s helped nearly 250 clients improve the cost information they rely on in making critical management decisions. He’s spoken at over 400 professional events, including five IMA Annual Conferences. In addition to numerous articles in professional and trade publications he’s written four successful books on managerial costing including one business novel. His third book, “I May Be Wrong, But I Doubt It: How Accounting Information Undermines Profitability” was rated the fourth best accounting book ever written by CFO Bookshelf. A graduate of the University of Michigan – Dearborn, he’s a long-time, active member of both the Michigan Association of CPAs and the Institute of Management Accountants and is one of the founders of the Profitability Analytics Center of Excellence