ABSTRACT
Business accounting before The Great Depression of 1929 was like the Wild Wild West, virtually no rules or standards. To achieve that objective, companies were required to follow an established set of rules and standards in their financial reporting, which would eventually be audited by independent CPAs external to the companies themselves. Another by-product of the emerging accounting principles and financial reporting standards was to provide some level of comparability of financial results over time and between different companies. Accounting and financial reporting rules, principles and standards were issued, re-issued, and issued some more. There have been many well vetted and intelligently developed cost accounting practices over the years in an attempt to build a better costing system. Virtually all traditional methods of cost accounting, at the very least, distort profit-targeted decision-making and, at their worst, can significantly distort managerial performance measures that are so very important to making strategically important decisions.
