Reviews the book "Management Accounting," by Robert N.Anthony.

Reviews the book "Mathematics of Accounting," fourth ed., by Arthur B. Curtis, John H. Cooper and William James McCallion.

Income can be measured properly only when every attempt is made to segregate and allocate overhead costs to units of output so that costs of products may be matched or associated with the revenues derived from the sale of merchandise. To accomplish this task the generally accepted fixed-variable cost breakdown should be discarded for income measurement purposes. The straight-line amortization of costs associated with fixed assets should also be discarded. In place of straight-line amortization, a unit-of-output amortization plan or an approximation thereto should be used. The approximation would be the cycle overhead concept. The fixed cost portion of semi-variable cost inputs should be reassociated with their variable counterparts and then allocated to the output for which they were absolutely necessary elements of production. Finally, unit costs should be allowed to fluctuate with volume within the range for which semi-variable cost inputs are absolutely necessary costs of production.

Reviews the book "Top Management Handbook," edited by H.B. Maynard.

Reviews the book "Profit Planning Through Volume-Cost Analysis," by John Y.D. Tse.

Successful decisions are the hope of every manager. Snap decisions indicate a disregard for scientific thinking and reliance upon intuition and chance, or an unusual mental ability to simulate the problem, determine the strategic factors, and evaluate the alternatives. Historically, accounting has developed as the result of a specific need. The balance sheet model was presented to satisfy a need for financial information. Each ledger account is a model, or method, of measuring all transactions (the relevant factors) of a business which are relevant to the respective ledger account as it is specifically defined and by a method recognized as generally accepted by the accounting profession. To identify a specific ledger account as meaningful, the account must be defined in terms of the relevant business transactions which the model (ledger) will summarize, as well as the specific method or methods by which these relevant transactions will be measured. Finally, the specific ledger account must be defined as a relevant factor in the total accounting system, including its relationship to all other relevant factors of the system. Thus the accounting system itself, as we identify it, consists of a model summarizing the relationships of a large number of smaller models presumably for some specific purpose.

The period cost concept divides cost data into two broad categories, firstly, "Period" costs which are those costs related to time, i.e., those costs which expire with the passage of time rather than with the volume of business activity, and secondly, "product" costs which include those costs which relate to the product being produced, i.e., those costs which are directly affected by the volume of business activity. Under the period cost concept as it relates to income measurement only variable manufacturing costs are considered inventoriable while fixed manufacturing costs as well as selling and administrative costs are period costs. In general the accounting profession does not accept for income measurement purposes the treatment of fixed manufacturing costs as period costs. Conversely the accounting profession has accepted for many years a period cost approach to the handling of selling and administrative costs. In this article the authors will show that the period cost concept is not appropriate for purposes of income measurement. It is the intention of this article to show that categorizations of cost such as period costs vs. product costs are not relevant to the process of income measurement.

This article presents the report of the Committee on Doctoral Programs in Accounting. The committee made various recommendations on how to improve the Doctoral programs. It suggested that the doctoral program is the principal educational process for preparing students both for university teaching and for basic research in accounting. Hence the primary objective of the study program for the doctorate should be to develop in the student original and incisive thinking and to create an attitude conducive to study and research. As wide variations in the backgrounds of doctoral students call for individually designed programs of course work, instruction in methods of teaching and familiarity with the learning process should be a part of the doctoral program. At the end of the study program the doctoral candidate should demonstrate proficiency in accounting and a reasonable understanding of economics, statistics, the functional areas of business, the behavioral sciences, and mathematical methods. And finally the demand for college teachers of accounting should not be an excuse for lowering the standards for the doctoral program.