Ever since there was a spurt in growth of business schools and awareness among the young people to acquire degrees from such schools, the subject Management Accounting has also undergone much changes with respect to its content in the syllabus, style of pedagogy adopted by professors, thanks to premier business schools across the globe including India. Intellectuals cite the reasons such as cut throat competitions, intricacies of business, some cases of companies who got success using techniques of Management Accounting discussed in the class room, etc. While the subject Management Accounting, being the traditional name still being followed in many business schools including IIM(B), IIM(L), FMS and many Universities, the name has undergone further changes like Accounting for Decision Making (Kellogg School of Business, IIT (D)), Cost Management (IIM (K)), Costing and Control System, Decision Making –I & II (IIM(A)) etc. Surely as the title of the subject changes, the lessons also do change with a war like competition among business schools, to bring lots of industry practiced concepts, trends and cases in this subject. In fact bodies like UGC and AICTE who regulate the activities of Business Schools, appear to keep blind eyes with respect to course content and pedagogy inside the class room delivery. There are incidents in the past like Sub-prime lending crisis, South East Asian crisis etc, which have given a lesson as to teaching only the fundamentals to students who are not experienced or students may be not capable to understand complexities involved and coming back to India when students come to join business school as mostly fresher without having a good number of years' of experience unlike students of Business Schools of US and UK, teaching advanced concepts to students in cost and management accounting in a time period of 30-40 hours generally, a point surely requires debate. It is even more surprising to see in some universities' MBA courses, the management accounting subject has been merged with the subject of Financial Accounting under a different tag, Accounting for Managers or Managerial Accounting. In this connection, Prof. Paresh Shah's Management Accounting is somewhat different. It appears that he has started with explaining the fundamentals with a very plain simple language, also keeping the traditions of other authors, has somehow managed to bring some cases, what he calls Conceptual cases and Business Application Cases to focus also on managerial use of concepts and tools of Management Accounting.

Prof. Shah appears to be aware of latest developments connecting to what is the appropriate style of teaching to Indian students and thus focused on laying a simplistic way of learning the fundamentals of tools and techniques of Management Accounting from the students perspective. As he has rightly pointed out “the subject explores the core concepts of management accounting through managerial applications and supplements them through numerous solved problems and case studies. It has been structured in such a way that it gives a blend of conceptual framework, elements of costs, determination of costs for different types of manufacturing and service organizations (i.e. service costing in addition to process, batch and contract costing), tools of planning and control and application of management accounting tools and techniques by management in present business environment.” The aforesaid statements clearly focus on giving the core and very fundamental learning of tools and techniques of the subject and later talking about the managerial application of same. Looking at the time frame of delivery of course in the class which is generally 30 to 40 hours in most of the business schools, he has some how given the indications that at the outset when the students are new to learning business practices, they should first learn the concepts and techniques and then the advanced concepts like what he has even talked about, i.e., learning curve, target costing, capacity costing, capacity management, kaizen costing, quality costing, activity costing etc, may be given in the 2nd year. Further being FCMA, (Fellow member of ICWAI, latest name being ICAI),he has done a serious work by bringing both Indian and international cost accounting standards and practices for the students and faculty, who are interested to seriously explore the subject.

BookReview

Management Accounting

Review

Oxford University Press

FIIB Business Review. Volume 2, Issue 1, January - March 2013

Prof. Ferojuddin M A Khan has more than 19 years of work experience in Teaching and Corporate, which includes more than 11years of Industry experience in the core sectors of economy i.e., Power (NTPC), Heavy Engineering (Bharat Yantra Nigam) and Financing (Kuber group of companies), besides having 8 years of teaching. Having the right blend of theory and practice, he is famous in the teaching fraternity as a faculty who can almost integrate any theory with lots of practical examples. He has conducted MDP for public sector companies such as NTPC, IRCON, GAIL in the area of Tax Planning, Cost reduction Strategies. Some of his noteworthy publications include Supplementary chapter on “Financial Information System” published by Oxford University Press, Case study on “Salary Taxation” fetched him certificate of merit from ISB Hyderabad, Case study on “Individual Values Vs. Organizational Practices” got published in International Journal, got best of five award from NIRC (ICWAI) in their “Article writing Competition”. He is a quality focused person as has undergone training on TQM, Business Process Re-engineering, Creativity, Kaigen. Besides, he himself is a ISO 9000 certified auditor and Site-Team Evaluator for ACBSP accreditation.

Paresh Shah

by Prof. Ferojuddin M A Khan

Total Pages: 793Book Price: Rs. 425/-ISBN No: 0-19-569525-9