Kenneth W. Boyd

The certified public accountant (CPA) credential is a valuable tool for you to obtain. The designation will help you pursue a career in accounting and in other areas of business. To become a CPA, you must study for and pass the CPA exam. To increase your chances of success, you need to make sure you’ve prepared properly, including completing the necessary paperwork and requirements for your state, and study thoroughly for each of the four tests that make up the exam.

When cost accounting, you put together your budgeting process for indirect costs with a plan for direct costs. Think of the combined process as normal costing. This is an important point: You trace direct costs and allocate indirect costs. Normal costing combines indirect cost rate with actual production. The process gets you closer to actual total costs for your product.

Financial statement fraud, commonly referred to as "cooking the books," involves deliberately overstating assets, revenues, and profits and/or understating liabilities, expenses, and losses. When a forensic accountant investigates business financial fraud, she looks for red flags or accounting warning signs that indicate suspect business accounting practices.

In cost accounting, the cost of goods available for sale represents the product’s total costs. Total costs have two components — joint costs and separable costs.Assume the cost of goods available for sale are $1,751,163 and $1,260,837 for the heavy-duty blower and the yardwork blower. Say the separable costs are $1,200,000 and $912,000.

In cost accounting, the cost of goods available for sale represents the product’s total costs. Total costs have two components — joint costs and separable costs. When possible, you want to reduce separable costs, but first take a look at your company’s joint costs.Assume you manufacture leaf blowers. Your two products are heavy-duty blowers and yardwork blowers.

In cost accounting, two types of capacity focus on production: theoretical capacity and practical capacity. Consider how much you could produce if customer demand was unlimited. Select a capacity method that makes sense to you, and use that as a tool to plan production and spending.Theoretical capacity assumes that nothing in your production ever goes wrong.

Accounting, as you may guess, involves a lot of math. As you practice various types of accounting problems, and when you begin doing accounting work for real, you will need to utilize various formulas to calculate the information you need.10 useful accounting formulasThe following are some of the most frequently used accounting formulas.