Even worse, I can’t recall the last time I spoke with an accountant for a manufacturing company who said operations was happy with the financial information that he or she provided. What’s wrong with this picture? Shouldn’t people managing operations have useful financial information? Where is the problem—operation’s ability to understand, or finance’s ability to provide useful information?
问题在于with finance, but not your finance department. It largely rests with the accounting profession. The finance department’s consuming objective is to produce financial information in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for audited financial statements, which are, if you’re a publicly traded company, provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and shareholders.
The problem is that this highly regarded information is designed for a particular audience—investors and creditors operating in the capital markets choosing between company level investment alternatives. GAAP information is not a model of the business designed to satisfy the needs of internal managers and employees. In fact, the joint International and U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board’s conceptual framework, which forms the basis for standards, makes the assumption that managers and employees of a company can get whatever information they need elsewhere. Therefore, internal needs aren’t of primary concern in financial reporting standards. This logic and focus on external financial statements dominates requirements for financial accounting systems.
The result is that nearly all costing methodologies are designed first and foremost to feed external financial statements. Product cost is gathered and recorded in fairly broad categories—direct labor, direct materials and overhead (all else). Typically, this is done with cost pools, which while auditable as a process, become rapidly disconnected from physical operational resources or processes.
此信息成为库存评估和销售商品成本的基础。此外，库存价值然后受外部财务报告可接受的平均或其他计算。财务报告的其他几项原则，例如通过报告期限和匹配收入和费用进行计算，也有助于损害财务会计信息对经理和员工的有用性。
Engineers help accountants
近年来的财务危机将更多的关注放在财务报告上，而较少关注的是以管理为重点的会计。管理会计是支持为内部决策支持创建信息的会计领域，其在会计和一般业务课程中的承保范围正在减少，而关注财务会计，报告和外部财务报告的控制结构也爆炸了。结果是越来越难以找到会计专业人员的知识或方向来改善内部管理成本成本信息。有趣的是，管理会计知识中一些最大的收益来自工程社区。
创建更多有用的财务信息是可能的。该解决方案在于建立运营模型并采用成本衡量方法，该方法着重于管理人员和员工作为主要客户的决策需求。
The best approach I’ve found for cost measurement and operations modeling is called Resource Consumption Accounting (RCA). Its core principle is that decision-making is based on making inferences from cause-and-effect relationships of how an organization’s resources are consumed, and then maintaining those relationships in the operational model and when costs are applied. RCA places a premium on understanding resource capacities and costs, generating high-quality marginal information, and applying the principles of logic and the scientific method to create decision support information that is meaningful to managers and employees.
Larry White，CMA，CPA，CGFM，lwhite@rcainstitute.org，是资源消费会计学院的执行董事（www.rcainstitute.org).
问题在于with finance, but not your finance department. It largely rests with the accounting profession. The finance department’s consuming objective is to produce financial information in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for audited financial statements, which are, if you’re a publicly traded company, provided to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and shareholders.
The problem is that this highly regarded information is designed for a particular audience—investors and creditors operating in the capital markets choosing between company level investment alternatives. GAAP information is not a model of the business designed to satisfy the needs of internal managers and employees. In fact, the joint International and U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board’s conceptual framework, which forms the basis for standards, makes the assumption that managers and employees of a company can get whatever information they need elsewhere. Therefore, internal needs aren’t of primary concern in financial reporting standards. This logic and focus on external financial statements dominates requirements for financial accounting systems.
The result is that nearly all costing methodologies are designed first and foremost to feed external financial statements. Product cost is gathered and recorded in fairly broad categories—direct labor, direct materials and overhead (all else). Typically, this is done with cost pools, which while auditable as a process, become rapidly disconnected from physical operational resources or processes.
此信息成为库存评估和销售商品成本的基础。此外，库存价值然后受外部财务报告可接受的平均或其他计算。财务报告的其他几项原则，例如通过报告期限和匹配收入和费用进行计算，也有助于损害财务会计信息对经理和员工的有用性。
Engineers help accountants
近年来的财务危机将更多的关注放在财务报告上，而较少关注的是以管理为重点的会计。管理会计是支持为内部决策支持创建信息的会计领域，其在会计和一般业务课程中的承保范围正在减少，而关注财务会计，报告和外部财务报告的控制结构也爆炸了。结果是越来越难以找到会计专业人员的知识或方向来改善内部管理成本成本信息。有趣的是，管理会计知识中一些最大的收益来自工程社区。
创建更多有用的财务信息是可能的。该解决方案在于建立运营模型并采用成本衡量方法，该方法着重于管理人员和员工作为主要客户的决策需求。
The best approach I’ve found for cost measurement and operations modeling is called Resource Consumption Accounting (RCA). Its core principle is that decision-making is based on making inferences from cause-and-effect relationships of how an organization’s resources are consumed, and then maintaining those relationships in the operational model and when costs are applied. RCA places a premium on understanding resource capacities and costs, generating high-quality marginal information, and applying the principles of logic and the scientific method to create decision support information that is meaningful to managers and employees.
Larry White，CMA，CPA，CGFM，lwhite@rcainstitute.org，是资源消费会计学院的执行董事（www.rcainstitute.org).
![Mps035 Sm 1200x628 D[2]](https://img.automationworld.com/files/base/pmmi/all/image/2021/03/MPS035_SM_1200x628_D_2_.604a4a336bc60.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&bg=fff&fill-color=fff&fit=fill&h=146&pad=5&q=70&w=340)
