Cost accounting

What Hacker News says

1. bdelmasMay 2025
   Marketing Management by Philip Kotler is the reference.

   For the rest it depends on what you need since they are very focused on one domain but for instance for accounting/finance: Cost Accounting by Charles Horngren, or Managerial Accounting for Managers by Eric Noreen is a must.

   Strategor - English version by João Albino-Pimentel is amazing. A lot of tools to get started are there with very neat examples from the industry.

   I have a few books that are great too. But if there is one to buy it could: The Personal MBA and then for each section get real education one way or another. From textbooks or anything.

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2. williamcottonFeb 2024
   Isn't the setup cost a key part of the total cost of analytics, especially when it comes to these MDS systems?

   I encourage anyone in a position to make purchases or who has a say in what engineer labor focuses on is to get a copy of Horngren's Cost Accounting. It should make my position very clear!

   FWIW, there is indeed capitalization occurring when an organization incorporates analytics, even the "measure all the things" approach, but the question is, once the total costs are discovered, does the return outweigh the expenditure?

   These things cannot be considered in isolation, especially when using advanced approaches like Activity-Based Costing, something that is basically a requirement for a product or service that is fundamentally software in nature. There is too much complexity to treat managerial accounting in a software setting like a steel mill.

   The reason why this doesn't happen is YOLO business management fueled by the casino that is VC backed companies. But we are in a rapidly maturing industry where margins are slimming and costs need to be reigned in, especially in publicly traded companies where investors will punish a company that makes wildly off target financial projections discovered when cash flows are reported in the following quarters.

   I encourage everyone in all management positions to start thinking about and tracking actual costs. Not story points, not customer use patterns, but cold hard cash!

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