5. Source of Principles. Financial accounting information must be reported in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). Outside users need assurance that the financial statements are prepared in accordance with a mutually understood set of ground rules.
An organization′s management, by contrast, can employ whatever accounting rules it finds most useful for its own purposes. Thus, a company’s management accounting information system may include data on unfilled sales orders (i.e. backlog), even though orders are not financial accounting transactions; it may state fixed assets at current values rather than historical cost; it may omit certain production overhead costs from inventories; and it may record revenues before they are “realized”—even though each of these system aspects is inconsistent with GAAP. Rather than asking whether it conforms to GAAP, the basic question in management accounting is pragmatic: Is the information useful?
6. Time Orientation. Financial accounting records and the financial history of an organization. Entries are made in the accounts only after transactions have occurred. Although financial accounting itself is historical. The objective of financial accounting is to “tell it like it was,” not like it will be. Management accounting, on the other hand, includes in its formal structure numbers that represent forecasts, estimates, and plans for the future, as well as information about the past.
7. Information Content. Financial accounting system capture only a few characteristics (i.e. date, account, and amount in dollars) about only a subset of organizational events, those defined by financial accounting to be “accounting transactions.” Financial accounting reports summarize the effects of these events in primarily monetary form. Management accounting reports, on the other hand, summarize many different kinds of information that is useful for decision makers. They include non-monetary as well as monetary information. They show quantities of material as well as its monetary cost, number of employees and hours worked as well as labors costs, units of products sold as well as dollar amounts of revenue, defect rates as well as scrap costs, and so on. Some of the information is strictly non-monetary; examples include new product development times, production yields, percentages of shipment made on time, product failure rates, numbers of customers complaints received, and competitors′s estimated market shares.
8. Information precision. Management needs information rapidly and is often willing to sacrifice some precision to gain speed in reporting. Thus, in management accounting approximates are often as useful as, or even more useful than, number that are more precise. Although financial accounting cannot be absolutely precise either, the approximations used in management accounting are broader than those in financial accounting.