<p>I am going back to college after taking a 2 year hiatus after getting over lifes problems like getting over my dad's death and my family losing their home. The problem is I forgot most of financial accounting, and I know you need to know some of it for managerial. What key concepts from financial accounting you need to know already for managerial accounting?</p>
<p>As Forrest Gump would say, managerial accounting and cost accounting are like a box of chocolates, except some of the chocolates have razor blades in them. It’s a grab bag of random topics and different instructors may choose different topics to focus on. There are some common </p>
<p>I do remember that understanding the whole relationship between inventory and cost of goods sold was a big deal. Inventory in general is a big deal actually – look up inventory cost flow assumptions, like FIFO, LIFO, and weighted average.)</p>
<p>Additionally it would be good to re-familiarize yourself with the structure of an income statement (sales revenue minus cost of goods sold = gross margin, that sort of thing).</p>
<p>A lot of managerial accounting is just taking a line item from the income statement or the balance sheet and learning how the company decided what number to write down for it. (For example, “cost of goods sold” do they use process costing, job costing, or some convoluted mixture? “Inventory” – do they use FIFO or LIFO?)</p>
<p>Ratios might come up now if they didn’t come up in financial accounting.</p>