Cost Accounting - A Managerial Emphasis, 14th Edition

I used this for a managerial course this past summer. First of all, this book is overpriced. Secondly, it is very dry, uninteresting, and a pain to read. The 13th edition covers the same material but the sneaky publishers changed up the numbers in the HW so you can't exactly use the 13th edition if the professor is assigning HW from the 14th. I think this is unethical and I think charging what they do for books like this should be a crime. Other than the HW, both editions cover the same material.

According to my professor and TA, this is an excellent book for managerial accounting. As a student, I am telling you that this book will frustrate you and make you angry because it is needlessly complicated. This is also compounded if you have poor instructors (like I had).

This is not a book you can use to teach yourself. You must go to class if you are using this book. After the first two chapters, the rest of the book will seem like a foreign language to you because it is all formula-based. Some people think that accounting is just adding and subtracting numbers; this book will dispel that myth by chapter three. The only way you are going to pass a class with this book is if you have talented professors or if you get yourself some tutoring. For example, in practice, the concept of ABC costing makes sense and I could probably explain it to you using some real world examples like manufacturing an iPhone or a similar popular product. This book takes ABC costing and it just makes it hard because it doesn't use real world examples and it does not take the extra step of simplifying the steps for you or giving you the bigger picture.

Each homework problem takes almost a half hour to complete and some of them are pretty hard. There are no answers in the back so you can't check your work. Also the language is not engaging at all and it is very dry and pedantic. Some books make a point and then explain it in a way that makes it easy for the student to understand. With this book, the author makes a point and then that's it; you have to figure out what it all means. I read chapter four for the first time and at the end I had no idea what I just read. Its like my brain took a break for the hour. The material is also sequential so if you are lost at chapter three, then you are lost for the rest of the book.

If your professor is using this book then there is not much you can do to get around it. I suggest you buy a used, old edition of some other managerial text to supplement this book. Another book might explain a concept much more clearly than this book and using both texts together might be better than using this one alone. I also still highly recommend you get a tutor or go to office hours while taking this class. In the end you will either do really well or really poorly. I don't think you can do average work in this class as the material is very "black and white"...kinda like a math class. Also, the Myaccountinglab problems take forever and have around 10 parts to each question so plan your time accordingly if your professor makes you use Myaccountinglab.

I only gave the book two stars because it is supposed to be a good book. Other than that, I think it makes managerial/cost accounting harder than it should be. If you find a section of a class that is not using this book...take that class and then worry about a real cost accounting course later. If your school is using this book for managerial accounting and you are not even an accounting major, then you are just setting yourself up for some unneeded stress as this is, for all intents and purposes, a cost accounting text and cost accounting is one of the hardest classes taken by accounting majors. Even if you are an accounting major, I think you need a real managerial course before you tackle cost. Financial and managerial accounting are not similar so diving right into this book without a real managerial accounting course is kinda stupid IMO.

I have no idea why a school would want to use this book as a managerial text. We used this text in managerial up till about chapter 11 and then chapter 23. We are currently using this same text in my cost accounting class and we started at ABC costing in chapter 5.

Every professor at my school who is familiar with this book agrees that it is "challenging." On the positive side, if you take your time and discipline yourself to do the work, you might actually enjoy the challenge of the text but if you are juggling several courses and you can't devote all of your time to this one class, then this book will be challenging.

My advice is for you is to give this class more time than you would another class. After chapter two, this book is like a runaway train so work hard and don't fall behind.