Reviews the book "Institutional Issues in Public Accounting," edited by Robert R. Sterling.

Accounting is a great profession being dedicated to integrity, independence, objectivity, high personal performance, and service. It tends to bring out the best in an individual. Since education is central to the accounting profession, as it is to all of the professions, accounting educators must give the educational aspects serious and continuing attention if they are to meet their responsibilities to the students and to the accounting profession generally. Within the context of a rapidly expanding social and economic complex, question has been raised as to whether accounting can meet an implicit challenge that will be ever-expanding. Hopefully, accounting will be commanded by highly educated men of vision and ingenuity, so that it will be transformed into an even greater force through expanding services. Accounting educators have a singular responsibility to both recognize and surmount the challenges facing accountancy and accounting education. These challenges have short and long-run implications, the latter clearly being more fundamental, and unfortunately less demanding at any given moment.

In the article, the author who is the President of the American Accounting Association for 1964, projects certain thoughts relative to the expanding role of the Association. The accomplishments of the Association and the many outstanding members over the past 47 years constitute a singularly significant phase of the history of accounting education and of the accounting profession in the U.S. The comparatively rapid increase in total membership and in attendance at the annual convention provides implicit evidence of the continuing impact of the Association. In the coming year, the association's aim will be to serve the membership and to rely heavily on those members who are willing to give of their time and talents on committees and in doing research and writing that contribute to its primary objectives of enhancing accounting education and building the accounting profession. With respect to research the association is in a favorable position to initiate, sponsor and conduct research both in accounting theory and in accounting education.

Reviews the book "Statistical Sales Forecasting," by Vernon G. Lippitt.

The article presents information about the report of the 1959 Committee on Management Accounting. The 1959 Committee has directed its efforts toward an amplification of this view of the nature and significance of management accounting by stating in more definite terms the functions to be performed by accounting in a business entity organized for profit, and by a listing of the major problem areas in which management accounting is of prime importance. The role of management accounting is to provide the management of a business with analyses and evaluations to assist in the fulfillment of this basic responsibility for effectively planning and controlling profits and investments. It is a service which is oriented toward the evaluation of the financial soundness of the future operating plans and programs of the enterprise and the anticipated profit consequences of alternative courses of action. The Committee believes that a significant need exists for a better and more general awareness of the proper role of management accounting in a well-managed business.

In January 1957, the Executive Committee of the American Accounting Association appointed the first committee on management accounting; the primary charge being "to clarify just what is meant by the term management accounting. In recent years there has been a growing awareness of the potential utilization of accounting data by management for internal purposes. At the same time there has been an increasing recognition of the limitations of accounting as it exists today in meeting these needs. Management accounting is the application of appropriate techniques and concepts in processing the historical and projected economic data of an entity to assist management in establishing a plan for reasonable economic objectives and in the making of rational decisions with a view toward achieving these objectives. It includes the methods and concepts necessary for effective planning, for choosing among alternative business actions and for control through the evaluation and interpretation of performance. Management accounting concepts are especially important in that they deal with the fundamentals of maximizing return on investment, a primary objective of the business entity. This is especially true in the field of marketing where the broad and complex problems of pricing, methods of distribution, marginal cost and product mix must be met and solved.