Managerial Accounting For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

Managerial accounting provides useful tools, such as cost-volume-profit relationships, to aid decision-making. Cost-volume-profit analysis helps you understand different ways to meet your company’s net income goals. This image describes the relationship among sales, fixed costs, variable costs, and net income:

image0.jpg

  • The bottom axis indicates the level of production — the number of units you make.

  • The left axis indicates value in dollars.

  • Where total sales equals total costs, the company breaks even (which is why that’s called the break-even point).

  • The shaded area to the upper right of this break-even point is profit.

  • The shaded region to the lower left is net loss.

  • Total variable costs are a diagonal line because the higher the production, the greater the variable costs.

  • The total fixed costs line is horizontal because regardless of the production level, fixed costs stay the same.

  • Total costs equal the sum of total variable costs and total fixed costs.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book author:

Mark P. Holtzman, PhD, CPA, is Chair of the Department of Accounting and Taxation at Seton Hall University. He has taught accounting at the college level for 17 years and runs the Accountinator website at www.accountinator.com, which gives practical accounting advice to entrepreneurs.

This article can be found in the category: