Financial Accounting Management Accounting

Financial and managerial accounting are two of the four largest branches of the accounting discipline, with the others being tax accounting and auditing. Despite many similarities in approach and usage, there are significant differences between the two. These differences center around compliance, accounting standards and target audiences.

Defining Managerial and Financial Accounting Objectives

The main objective of managerial accounting is to produce useful information for internal use. Business managers collect information that encourages strategic planning; set realistic goals; and efficient directing of company resources.

Financial accounting has some internal uses as well, but it is much more concerned with informing those outside of the company. The final accounts, or financial statements, produced through financial accounting are designed to disclose business performance and financial health. If managerial accounting is created for a company's management, then financial accounting is created for its investors, creditors and regulators.

Past and Present Use

The information created through financial accounting is entirely historical; financial statements contain data for a defined period of time. Managerial accounting looks at past performance and creates business forecasts. Business decisions should be informed by this type of accounting.

Investors and creditors often use the financial statements to create forecasts of their own. In this way, financial accounting is not entirely backwards-looking. Nevertheless, no future forecasting is allowed in the statements.

Regulation and Uniformity

The most glaring practical difference between financial accounting and managerial accounting is legal treatment. Reports generated through managerial accounting are only circulated internally. Each company is free to create its own system and rules on managerial reports.

Financial accounting reports are highly regulated. This is particularly evident with the income statement, balance sheet and cash flow statement. Since this information is released for public consumption, companies must be very careful about how they make calculations, how figures are reported and in what order those reports must be constructed.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board, or FASB, under the influence of the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, establishes financial accounting rules in the United States. The sum of these rules is referred to as generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP, or U.S. GAAP.

Through this uniformity, investors and lenders compare companies directly on the basis of their financial statements. Moreover, financial statements are released on a regular schedule, establishing consistency of external information flows.

Reporting Details

For a variety of reasons, financial accounting reports tend to be aggregated, concise and generalized. Information is simultaneously clearer and less revealing. This is not normally the case with managerial accounting.