Customer Reviews

Advanced Management Accounting (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I am an accounting student at the Univ. of Sask. I had to buy this text for my Mangagement Accounting class. This book is incomplete when they are doing examples. The writers don't explain where they got their numbers from. It's very difficult trying to learn it. Also, the exercise problems at the end are horrible!! They are so vague!!!

I found the text to be poorly proofread. Some of the examples in the text did not tie to the information given. I found the examples hard to follow and the explanations vague. I expected a lot more from Mr. Kaplan.

I have studied, practiced and taught managerial accounting for more than 17 years at work, using excellent supporting text and case books from recognized US authors. But to be honest Dr. Kaplan is making easy concepts to appear complicated and cumbersome. His case readings as well as the text materials are very length and hard to "digest" since it does not capture the attention of the reader.I would not recommend the book neither for and undergraduate or graduate degree, despite the well known and worldwide recognition of Dr. Kaplan. His book is far from being pedagogical in nature.

I have studied many aspects of financial and management accounting, management issues, etc. from introductory to advanced levels. I have never used such an unappealing book. The student must sift through much wordiness. There are few, and sometimes no examples of the various calculations. There is very little use of white space. Virtually no colour, no use of bullets. Not only is the material presented in a "dry" form, but the book is not pretty to look at. The most praise I can give this book is that it is not too heavy to carry, and it has a pretty blue cover.

MBA students alike may not even have the patient to read through it. But, as a management consultant in China ( i used to work for 2 of big 4 accounting firms, and now working as a freelance to help local companies to solve their managerial costing problems), this book is my primary reference for my work. I applied ideas in this book helping my clients building ABC and transfer pricing and costing control models. When you really need to solve true business problems (rather than reading in the school), you will find this is "the" book. In my view, you have to read Kaplan and Cooper's staff if you want to get some true knowledge about managerial accounting.

This book not classic. It contains chapters deal with subjects like performance evaluation and incentives in depth and by using advanced models. It also deals with ABC & ABM by using simle examples.

I'm an accounting lecturer.

This book is very, very poor. Even if you already know what Kaplan is trying to explain, it is almost impossible to follow his incoherent ramblings.

A textbook to avoid at all costs.

There is no doubt that Kaplan is one of the leaders (if not the preeminent scholar) in his field. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to do any reasonable paper or research concerning the balanced scorecard and not reference his work.

That said, I have been in industry for more years than I care to remember, am a second year MBA accounting student at a fairly prestigious business school (no, not Harvard) with an Ivy league undergraduate education and I have received numerous academic awards.

In reading Advanced Management Accounting (3rd Edition), I don't know if the author was paid by the word, the page or just preferred to use 10 words when 1 will do, but I found that the value of the book was diminished by the writing style. As I alluded to earlier, the ideas presented are excellent but I am left feeling like I just sat through a 2 hour movie story that took 3 1/2 hours to tell. It certainly would be easier to carry a 400 page book to class than this 794 page version. I personally feel that it would leave a bigger mark on the student actually reading the book.

The explanation is too long, examples are vague, ambiguous and the cases provided is not really relevant to my level of knowledge. This book might be best for PhD holders, but not for me who is an undergraduate. My lecturer also complained that the explanation used is not suitable for our level. No interesting graphics or colour to attract readers.

This student textbook assumes a basic of management accounting. Well, I was known with the terms, and understood their examples, but completely lost track at the cases. At first I thought it was due to my language knowledge, but colleague students had the same problems and couldnot explain to me which information to use, which parts of the cases was useful and what was rubbish. Of course 'management accounting' is about retrieving the correct information, but it was a few steps to early for me.