One of the major difficulties in writing this book was to capture current thinking and practice in management accounting, which is in a continual state of change. Unlike the financial accounting area, there are no accounting standards or legally enforceable practices, and few widely-publicised debates over appropriate accounting practice. Management accounting takes place within organisations and can be quite specific to each business. Also, to understand the nature of management accounting practice we need to understand the broader aspects of business practice, across a range of areas including strategy, marketing, human resource management, operations management and organisational behaviour. Management accounting both draws on and contributes to these areas.

Our approach in presenting management accounting to students and managers is to focus on cutting-edge management accounting as practised by leading organisations in Australia and overseas, while at the same time acknowledging that some firms are satisfied to implement more conventional approaches to management accounting.

Since we began the first edition of this book in the early 1990s, there have been dramatic changes in thinking about the role of management accounting in organisations. Once it was sufficient to describe management accounting as being concerned with providing information for planning and control and for decision making. However, as you will see in this fourth edition, the role of management accounting has matured. It is now concerned with the processes and technologies that enable the effective use of organisational resources, to support managers in enhancing customer and shareholder value.

The processes and technologies of management accounting that enhance shareholder and customer value are also evolving over time. Understanding how to design and implement contemporary cost management techniques or performance measurement systems requires an intimate knowledge of the nature of the business, its markets, its strategy and its people. Over the decades the practice of management accounting has developed to become more a part of the process of management, and less a part of the practice of accounting.

This book has been written primarily as a text for one- or two-semester undergraduate management accounting courses. The references at the end of each chapter and the associated web material provide guidance on additional readings. With its description of current practice and strong emphasis on the new developments in management and management accounting, this book also provides a sound foundation for a management accounting unit within an MBA course.

While the origins of this text can be traced to the US text, Managerial Accounting, by Ronald Hilton, it has always differed from its US origins. With the title change of this current edition from Management Accounting: An Australian Perspective to Management Accounting: Information for Managing and Creating Value, there is a further departure from the US text. It has been developed using major cases based on real Australian businesses and includes numerous illustrations of current management accounting practices of organisations in Australia, New Zealand and the wider Asia–Pacific region. The Australian book takes a broad perspective in viewing management accounting as the efficient and effective use of resources, supporting managers in the improvement of customer and shareholder value. The rapidly changing business environment is seen as having implications for the development of new approaches to management accounting. A significant proportion of this new edition is devoted to chapters that describe leading-edge developments in management and management accounting practice.

We sincerely welcome any comments or suggestions from the lecturers and students who use this text.

Kim Langfield-Smith
Helen Thorne