Both financial accounting and managerial accounting deal with the same economic events of a company. The difference lies in the purpose they serve and the perspective they take. Determining the unit cost of manufacturing a product, for example, falls within managerial accounting, whereas reporting the total cost of goods manufactured and sold belongs to financial accounting.

Both fields are also subject to the same fundamental requirement: a company's economic events must be quantified in monetary terms and communicated to interested parties. The aim is to measure information and present it to users in a form they can understand.

Who Uses the Reports