Give Some Details Of Cost Accounting?

In the early stages of its development, cost accounting dealt with factory costs for use in inventory valuation, profit determination and pricing. These are still important aspects of cost accounting but the field has been expanded in areas such as cost control, budgeting, and cost determination for a variety of managerial uses, and the field has also been broadened to include administrative, selling, and distribution costs, and the cost and control problems of non manufacturing businesses.

Cost accounting routines necessarily involve accumulation, recording and reporting costs by type of expense, by area of responsibility, and by products and services. However, managerial interest lies in the use of cost information in planning and controlling the operations of a business and in arriving at decisions in a variety of business problems.

Effective use of information supplied by cost accounting involves both an understanding, on the part of the supplier of information, of the purpose for which the information is to be used and an understanding of the way it can and will be used for this purpose. Effective use also involves an understanding, on the part of the user, of the basis and possible limitations of the information supplied, as well as of the way it can and should be used for a given purpose.