1.Your initial posting is to be your opportunity to share your opinions and expectations prior to starting this course of financial and managerial accountants relative to your past, current and future personal and/or professional activities. Include what your opinions and expectations your personal and/or professional use of financial and managerial accounting in your decision-making (e.g., purchasing versus leasing a car, investing in your formal education versus spending this time working a second job or spending more time with family and friends),

2. By now you might be wondering why and how can there be so many types of costs.

Go to each of the so-called Big 4 Certified Public Accounting (CPA) firms, which are PriceWaterHouse Coopers (PWC), Deloitte, Ernst and Young (EY) and KPMG. The URLs to their home pages are as follows: PWC.com Deloitte.com EY.com KPMG.com and you can search for their home pages using the CPA firm's name in the search area of the browser.For EY.com, narrow your search by date by selecting Last 60 days. s

Search for Cost Defined and explore what you find. While the focus of this discussion is about the "diversity" surrounding the definition of cost, the Big 4 CPA firms also hire people with academic backgrounds other than accounting. As you journey forward with your formal education and professional career, you should consider employment with one of these global firms.

In addition to sharing your impressions of what you find on the Big 4 CPA firms regarding costs defined, define and discuss one or more of the following costs:

1. Variable costs
2. Fixed costs
3. Direct costs
4. Indirect costs
5. Manufacturing costs
6. Nonmanufacturing costs
7. Administrative costs
8. Product costs
9. Period costs
10. Overhead costs
11. Use of costs in calculating contribution margin and breakeven
12. Mixed costs
13. Differential costs
14. Sunk costs
15. Opportunity Costs
16. Cost of quality
17. Another type of cost that find interesting and/or confusing

Even though you might not aspire to be an accountant, as a leader and manager you need to be able to communicate effectively and efficiently with accountants. The quantitative problems help operationalize the definitions, concepts and techniques. It is usually easy to the definitions, concepts and techniques. It is usually challenging to operationalize the definitions, concepts and techniques. The quantitative problems are your opportunity to meet the challenge of operationalizing the definitions, concepts and techniques at an introductory level. Even at an introductory level, the challenge is significant as you probably have already experienced.