The Accreditation of Prior Learning Scheme is designed to provide formal assessment of understanding of practical Accountancy and Financial Management skills. Standards of Competence. The assessment is based on Standards of Competence designed by the Academy. The Standards are expressed as separate Units and are grouped for each Grade of Membership. The Standards will provide …
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Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) is widely used in the UK University and College sectors. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) use the technique when assessing candidates for their premier award Chartered Manager (CMg).A number of other UK Professional Bodies also include it in their assessment models to verify candidate competence in a range of disciplines. …
Working capital is a key element in business success. Successful business is about investing in the right ideas, the right equipment, and the right people. And to invest businesses need capital – either from the owners, from retained profits or from other willing to advance credit or loans. There are two type of capital need: …
Much literature cities Japanese companies developing and using target costing; Toyota, Honda and Nissan are such examples. In the US Caterpillar and Chrysler are examples where economic benefit of the technique have been noteworthy. Traditional Pricing Full cost pricing has been the model used by many businesses in the past. Standard and standard costing technique …
Zero Base/ Priority Base Budgeting is defined in CIMA terminology as: “A method of budgeting whereby all activities are re-evaluated each time a budget is set. Discrete levels of each activity valued and a combination chosen to match funds available.” A further definition is “an operating, planning and budgeting process which requires each manager to …
The notion of cash flow and funds flow has been included in accounting standards for almost three decades. For example in the UK, SSPA 10 (1976), Source and Application of Funds Statement, was an early attempt by standard setters to provide a link between the balance sheet at the start of the accounting period, the …
Benchmarking The term benchmarking has become fashionable in management culture and is now widely used in board-rooms throughout the UK. Johnson and Scholes, in their book Exploring Corporate Strategy, state that benchmarking involves comparison of competences with best practice including comparison beyond the organisation’s own industry. This involves a search for best practice and the …
Professor Philip Dunn explains the behavioural aspects of budgetary control. Finance Staff together with Budget users need an awareness of how behaviour patterns are often shaped by the budgeting process, and why behavioural aspects are more to the fore in budgetary control than any other technique in management accounting.
CIMA’s definition of a budget is “a plan expressed in money. It is prepared and approved prior to the budget period and may show income expenditure and the capital to be employed. It may be drawn showing incremental effects on former budgeted or actual figures or complied by zero-base budgeting.”
Allocation of overhead is one of the problems that bedevils any form of costing. And the more sophisticated the business, the more difficult or arbitrary those allocations seem.
Businesses need to know the cost of their product so as to control those costs and get their pricing right. And adding up the raw material and cost of direct labour needed to manufacture a product may be relatively straightforward.