Inventory Accounting: A Comprehensive Guide (Wiley Best Practices) [Hardcover]

Steven M. Bragg (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471356425 | ISBN-13: 978-0471356424 | Publication Date: February 18, 2005 | Edition: 1

Dramatically improve inventory accuracy with bestselling author Steven Bragg's step-by-step guidelines

Inventory Accounting is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to setting up an inventory accounting system and keeping it running at maximum efficiency. This hands-on book provides accounting professionals with essential information on how to:
* Set up an accounting system that efficiently handles accumulating inventory costs, summarizing accounts, and standard journal entries used to record transactions
* Use best practices to increase the efficiency of inventory-tracking and costing functions
* Install unique controls to combat inventory fraud
* Implement a step-by-step checklist of activities for inventory counting procedures
* Save hours of valuable time researching various GAAP reference manuals
* Adapt inventory tracking and costing systems to accommodate a variety of manufacturing systems

Spanning the entire spectrum of inventory accounting, Inventory Accounting deftly explores every facet of the field to help professionals eliminate inaccuracies from their inventory accounting systems.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

Accurate inventory accounting is vital to every company that has a significant proportion of its assets in inventory. It can also be one of the most difficult tasks faced by the accounting department. Accurate inventory valuation requires excellent inventory tracking systems, warehouse layouts, and cycle counting procedures, as well as detailed cost accumulation systems. In addition, generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) contain a number of requirements for the proper treatment of inventory valuation. In Inventory Accounting, bestselling author Steven Bragg culls his decades of experience to help CFOs, controllers, accounting managers, and cost accountants track, cost, report, and budget their inventory with great success.

Inventory Accounting provides professionals with a wellspring of essential day-to-day information, including:

• How to use coding, wireless data transmission, radio frequency identification, document imaging, and electronic data interchange to collect inventory data
• How to flow inventory through basic manufacturing, manufacturing resources planning, and just-in-time systems
• Sixty-eight unique inventory controls in such areas as in-transit inventory, inventory storage, obsolete inventory, and inventory transactions
• How to recognize eighteen types of inventory fraud
• A variety of measurements, forms, and reports for determining the status of inventory levels and related systems
• A successful budgeting process for raw materials, work-in-process, and finished goods inventories
• How to use a number of inventory cost layering systems, including FIFO, LIFO, dollar value LIFO, link-chain, and weighted average methods
• How to apply lower of cost, or market rule
• Coverage of overhead cost pools and how to apply those costs to inventory (including activity-based costing)
• Various cost allocation and pricing methodologies for inventory designated as joint products or by-products
• How to locate, dispose of, and account for obsolete inventory
• How to create an inventory tracking system and conduct periodic physical counts and cycle counts

An expansive compendium of inventory-related information, Inventory Accounting is a one-stop resource for everything pertaining to the proper accounting treatment of inventory, as well as the best practices for organizing a warehouse and conducting inventory counts.

From the Back Cover

Dramatically improve inventory accuracy with bestselling author Steven Bragg's step-by-step guidelines

Inventory Accounting is a comprehensive, step-by-step guide to setting up an inventory accounting system and keeping it running at maximum efficiency. This hands-on book provides accounting professionals with essential information on how to:

• Set up an accounting system that efficiently handles accumulating inventory costs, summarizing accounts, and standard journal entries used to record transactions
• Use best practices to increase the efficiency of inventory-tracking and costing functions
• Install unique controls to combat inventory fraud
• Implement a step-by-step checklist of activities for inventory counting procedures
• Save hours of valuable time researching various GAAP reference manuals
• Adapt inventory tracking and costing systems to accommodate a variety of manufacturing systems

Spanning the entire spectrum of inventory accounting, Inventory Accounting deftly explores every facet of the field to help professionals eliminate inaccuracies from their inventory accounting systems.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 243 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 18, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471356425
• ISBN-13: 978-0471356424
• Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #463,097 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #46 in Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Distribution & Warehouse Management

More About the Author

The primary question I receive is, why would anyone write so many accounting books? The story began in the early 1990s, when my former boss, Jan Roehl-Anderson, asked me to assist in taking over a book called Controllership from Jim Willson (correct spelling), who had been maintaining the book since the early 1950s. I liked the experience, and even found it relaxing (I must have issues!).

So... I had an idea for another book, called Just-in-Time Accounting, which the publisher accepted, and which got me on the track of doing management accounting books. Most accounting books up to that point had primarily dealt with accounting principles and not how to management the department, so this was a rich area for new books.

The Accounting Best Practices book, which is one of the top-selling accounting books in the country, started when I was bouncing around ideas for new books with one of my editors, John DeRemigis. He suggested the accounting best practices idea, and I said, "nah, there's not enough material." Four editions later and over 400+ pages long, it appears that he was right and I was wrong.

Writing became more intense in 2005, when John Wiley & Sons recommended me to the authors of the Wiley GAAP Guide as a new co-author. This is a seriously technical high-end accounting principles guide, and so was nothing like what I had written before. My first assignment was adding a hundred or so new examples to the book, which was absolutely frantic -- imagine becoming an expert on a really far-out accounting topic in one day, writing an esoteric example, and then hurrying on to an entirely different example the next day.

I have just finished writing Accounting Controls Best Practices, which is chock-full of control points for the most common accounting systems, as well as for best practices upgrades to those systems. And now, it is time for a break, if only for a week.

So... I am heading to the Western Pacific for some serious diving off a live aboard dive boat.

Steve Bragg