The current challenges that the managers have to face put an increasing pressure on the needs for new management accounting instruments. These have to fulfill two main objectives: to offer a better understanding of the costs and to enhance the decisional process. That’s why management accounting is considered to be the a “construction” based on two pillars: structure and strategy.
The last two decades have brought more evidence that costs are used mainly for two reasons: evaluation of inventories and support for the calculation of short term financial indicators. The new purpose should be to calculate the costs in a way that emphasizes the strategy. The point is to find a way to bring the creation of value as the core of the new management accounting system, in which the relation between the activities gives the way to trace the costs. Taking into consideration the Porters’ value chain is different than considering the idea of added value. We cannot talk about calculating costs without thinking about cost for the entire life cycle of products, about the importance of the intangible investments (which very often are considered period costs) and without considering the “strategic segments”, which can be the new cost objectives for management accounting.
The new model of management accounting in the Romanian practice should consider the enterprise an a whole, complex and strategic oriented network of competences, with horizontal correlation between activities, very different that the Taylor’s model of the enterprise.