The Management Accounting Standards

CMA Canada did great work in consolidating the knowledge of management accounting into an extensive published line of work, known as the Body of Knowledge. It was all published in hard copy in the years to 1997, and then converted into PDF format during 2005-2006. None of it appears in the CPA Canada website - at least there is nothing that gives credit to this work. During the latter years, it was organized into three main categories:

• Management Accounting Standards, formatted in similar manner to the old CICA Handbook

• Management Accounting Guidelines

• Issues Papers

As far as I know, we CMAs are still bound to have regard to all this when going about our tasks. In that regard, CMA Canada has 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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

The original introduction to the standards was here:

I have not attempted to consolidate the original PDF files that were given to the membership in the early 2000s.

The MAS for cost finding:

The MAS for cost using:

The MAS for strategic management control: