CMA Canada did a great job of consolidating and streamlining the practice of management accounting, but little of it appears to be available on the CPA Canada website, and no credit is given to the previous work done. Fortunately, I still have all the hard copy in the Management Accounting Practices Handbook that was issued starting in the mid-90s, and PDF files of many of the issues were issued in 2005-2006, together with the publication of Management Accounting Standards.
I will go through and list all the guidelines, issues papers and standards that were issued up to 1998. As far as I know, none of these has ever been revoked.
Management Accounting Guidelines
The MAG Statement of Purpose and Operation describes their intent thus:
Management Accounting Guidelines are designed to be an authoritative source which identifies the relevant information required to arrive at rational decisions. Where alternative techniques or procedures are available to implement decisions and policies, the guidelines will recommend the preferred practice in given circumstances.
There were 48 MAGs issued in total:
- Post Appraisal of Capital Expenditures
- Estimating Cash Flows for Capital Expenditure Decisions
- Framework for Internal Control
- Estimating the Discount Rate for Capital Expenditure Decisions
- Cash Management
- Foreign Currency Risk Management
- Managing the Annual Financial Statements Audit
- Accounts Receivable Management
- Strategic Planning for Information Resource Management
- Organizational Restructuring
- Selecting the Optimum Product Line for an Enterprise
- Pension Plan Management
- Managing Banking Relations
- Managing Quality Improvements
- Human Resources - Accountability
- Implementing Benchmarking
- Implementing Activity-Based Costing
- The Design of Executive Incentive Compensation Plans
- Implementing Just-In-Time Production Systems
- Information Systems and Services Management - Accountability
- Implementing Business Process Redesign
- Becoming a Time-Based Competitor
- Outsourcing Information Systems
- Implementing Electronic Data Interchange
- Becoming ISO 9000 Registered
- Implementing Workplace Flexibility
- Distribution Channels Management - Accountability
- Implementing Target Costing
- Product Life Cycle Management
- Managing Cross-Functional Teams
- Developing Comprehensive Performance Indicators
- Building Buyer-Seller Partnerships
- World Class Research & Development Management
- Managing the Human Aspects of Organizational Change
- Tools and Techniques for Effective Benchmarking Studies
- Monitoring Customer Value
- Implementing Corporate Environmental Strategies
- Implementing Self-Directed Work Teams
- Developing Comprehensive Competitive Intelligence
- Tools and Techniques of Environmental Accounting for Business Decisions
- Value Chain Analysis for Assessing Competitive Advantage
- Measuring the Cost of Capacity
- Redesigning the Finance Function
- Measuring and Managing Shareholder Value Creation
- Understanding and Implementing ISO 14000
- Implementing Ethics Strategies Within Organizations
- Implementing Process Management: A Framework for Action
- Building a Data Warehouse
International Management Accounting Practices
The International Federation of Accountants has issued several practice statements that aim to harmonize certain concepts in use:
- Management Accounting Concepts
- The Capital Expenditure Decision
- Currency Exposure and Risk Management
- Management Control of Projects
- Managing Quality Improvements (essentially an adoption MAG 14)
- Post Completion Review
- Strategic Planning for Information Resource Management (essentially an adoption of MAG 9)
Management Accounting Issues Papers
The MAIP Statement of Purpose explained the rationale as follows:
Issues Papers provide information about "leading edge" management processes and management accounting practices.Issues Papers also provide an opportunity to stimulate informed debate on some of the more provocative questions that organizations should be aware of or must contend with in their day-to-day operations.
There were 16 papers issued in total:
- Accounting for the environment
- The role of management accounting in electronic data interchange
- Activity-based costing
- Virtual corporations - How real?
- Management control systems in excellent Canadian companies
- Agile competition: The emergence of a new industrial order
- Benchmarking: A survey of Canadian practice
- Strategic partnering
- Electronic commerce
- Activity-based management
- Improving shareholder wealth
- Measuring the impact of diversity
- Codes of ethics, practice and conduct
- Accounting for sustainable development: A business perspective
- Corporate governance: The role of internal control
- The management of intellectual capital: The issues and the practice
Management Accounting Standards
During 2002-2006, Management Accounting Standards were issued, and numbered in the same manner as those in the CICA Handbook. No consolidated PDF was issued at the time, but I have compiled one from the files I have:
The major sections were:
- 2000: Cost finding
- 3000: Cost using
- 4000: [Not used]
- 5000: Strategic performance measure and process control
- 6000: Management control
- 7000: Information technology
- 8000: Change management
- 9000: Stakeholder reporting
The standards are prescriptive only in the sense where they advise what techniques and procedures not to use. CMA Canada expressed their purpose in these words:
One of the most important developments in the evolution of Strategic Management Accounting has been the notion that organizations can develop different cost information for different decisions.These Standards are intended to support this fundamental principle as their purpose is twofold:
- To review common practice alternatives and discuss the relative merits of each. The intent is not to regulate, prescribe, or otherwise impose a uniform style of management accounting. Rather, the purpose is to identify which of the possible practice alternatives will best meet the needs, and advance the strategic objectives or competitive interests, of a particular organization in a particular setting.
- There are contractual settings where resources are exchanged or decisions are made based on cost information. Examples include cost-plus reimbursement contracts, insurance claims that require property valuations based on cost, predatory pricing disputes that require a comparison between market price and cost, and regulatory environments where allowed prices are based on cost. When parties enter into a contract using cost measures, there is a need for cost standards and generally accepted definitions to insure that there are reasonable methods available for computing and defining costs that both parties understand and accept. In this sense, the role of these standards is to eliminate alternatives that are clearly unacceptable in order to provide a set of reasonable and well-defined alternatives to the contracting parties.
Recasting of guidelines and papers
In 2005-2006, most of the guidelines were converted into PDF format and organized into various categories. They were not numbered as in the previous hard-copy series.
In this table, those carried over from the previous hard-copy versions are cross-referenced and identified in italics. Those ones that are new to the series are identified in bold.
From the cross-referencing, it is apparent that the following guidelines and papers were not incorporated into the new series, and there is no indication that they have been formally withdrawn:
- MAGs 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 18 and 24
- IPs 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9 and 10
The framework after the CPA Canada merger
It was a challenge to get this far. I thank Worldcat for finding out about all the guidelines and papers that were issued.
As for the current structure, the CPA Canada website is totally unhelpful in determining what exists now. Even running a web search of the site does not reveal the total picture. The guidelines that do exist are broken down between overviews, guidelines and related case studies, and there is no announcement when something new has been issued. That is extremely different from what had been the case before, when master lists of the publications were on the CMA Canada site, and members were given USB sticks at meetings that had the complete rundown of what had been issued to date. Before that, the members were mailed hard copies of the publications, and binders to keep them in. I still have all mine!
I will attempt to give a listing, together with hyperlinks, to what exists now. That will be in a separate post.
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