D559 Advanced Managerial Accounting, catalog number ACCT 6335, is a three-CU graduate course on problem solving for managerial accounting issues in the planning and control of organizations. The word control is the one that separates it from the undergraduate course. At this level the subject is not primarily how to compute a cost; it is how the act of measuring something changes what the people being measured decide to do.
Measurement changes behaviour, and that is the subject
Every performance measure is an instruction. Measure a plant manager on unit cost and inventory will build, because producing more spreads fixed overhead across more units and makes the number look better. Measure a sales team on revenue and discounting appears. Measure a division on return on investment and profitable projects earning slightly less than the division's current average will be declined, because accepting them lowers the measure the manager is judged on.
None of those responses are irrational and none require bad faith. They are what the measurement asked for. Graduate managerial accounting is the study of designing systems where the measured behaviour and the desired behaviour are the same thing, and where they cannot be, of knowing which distortion you have accepted.
Responsibility accounting is the structural answer. Managers are held to what they control: a cost centre for costs, a profit centre for revenues and costs, an investment centre for the capital employed as well. The principle sounds obvious and is violated constantly in practice, because allocating shared costs to a manager who cannot influence them is easier than deciding not to allocate them. A submission that identifies a manager being charged for something outside their control has found the central defect in most real systems.
Transfer pricing is where all of this becomes concrete. The price at which one internal unit sells to another determines both units' reported results and therefore both managers' incentives, and the price that makes each division decide correctly for the organization as a whole is frequently not the price either division would choose. This is the classic examinable tension in the course.
Planning a document that recommends a system, not a number
Aspects in your Course of Study are scored independently and each needs a 2. Graduate managerial aspects usually ask you to compute something and then evaluate what the computation does to behaviour, and the second half carries the higher marks.
Worked example, computation then consequence. Suppose your rubric shows seven scored aspects and the directions ask for roughly 2,500 words. Reserve 170 for the organizational context, leaving 2,330, or 333 per aspect. Then apply a fixed internal ratio to each: about 120 words on the computation and about 210 on the behavioural consequence. Writing to that ratio deliberately prevents the most common graduate-level failure here, which is a technically flawless analysis that never says what any manager would do differently.
Where an aspect concerns performance measure design or transfer pricing, allow it 450 and take the difference from a purely computational aspect. Those two topics have no correct answer that can be stated briefly, and a compressed treatment reads as an assertion rather than as a recommendation.
Responsibility centres and the measures that fit them
This table anchors the analysis when a task asks you to evaluate or design a control system. Task directions take precedence where they set a structure.
| Centre type | What the manager controls | Measure that fits | The distortion it invites |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost centre | Spending against a defined output | Cost variances against a flexed budget | Quality reduced to hit a cost target |
| Revenue centre | Sales volume and mix | Revenue and mix variances | Discounting to move volume regardless of margin |
| Profit centre | Revenues and the costs incurred to earn them | Contribution and controllable profit | Deferring discretionary spend into the next period |
| Investment centre | Profit and the capital employed | Return on investment or residual income | Declining good projects that dilute a strong current return |
| Discretionary expense centre | Spending where output is hard to measure | Budget adherence plus qualitative review | Spending the full budget so it is not reduced next year |
| Internal supplier | Output transferred to another unit | Transfer price based on the situation, not a single rule | Optimizing the division at the expense of the organization |
Residual income deserves a mention wherever an investment centre appears, because it addresses the exact distortion that a rate-based measure creates: charging the division for the capital it uses and measuring what remains removes the incentive to reject projects that earn above the cost of capital but below the current average return.
Supporting a recommendation about people and numbers
The evidence in this course is partly quantitative and partly behavioural, and both halves need support.
- Show the computation that reveals the distortion, rather than asserting that a measure causes a behaviour. One worked comparison at two output levels usually proves it.
- State the assumptions in any allocation, since the allocation base determines the result and a different base would move reported profit between units.
- Where you propose a measure, say what behaviour it rewards and what it will be gamed on, because every measure can be.
- Cite frameworks and course material in APA paraphrase, with minimal quotation since submissions are similarity-checked.
- Quantify the cost of the control itself. Measurement consumes resource, and a system that costs more than the behaviour it corrects is a poor recommendation.
Capacity is the hidden variable in a surprising number of these problems and it is worth checking before any recommendation is written. Whether the supplying unit has spare capacity determines the correct floor for a transfer price, whether a special order should be accepted, and whether an outsourcing decision releases cost or merely relocates it. The same scenario produces opposite answers at full capacity and below it, because at full capacity every unit supplied internally displaces a sale that would have been made externally. Establish the capacity position explicitly in the setup and the rest of the analysis becomes considerably less contestable.
Non-financial measures belong in a graduate answer wherever the task concerns performance management. Financial results are lagging indicators: by the time a margin has fallen the causes are months old. Adding a small number of leading measures tied to the same objective, and explaining the causal chain from the leading measure to the financial one, is the difference between a scorecard and a list of numbers.
What a Competent advanced managerial submission shows
Each aspect is scored on its own against the competency standard, and the standard is whether the analysis would improve an actual management system.
- Every computation is followed by its behavioural consequence for a named manager.
- Managers are evaluated only on what they control, and any violation of that principle is identified.
- Transfer pricing analysis distinguishes the divisional optimum from the organizational one.
- Proposed measures are accompanied by the ways they can be gamed.
- Recommendations account for the cost of operating the control.
WGU records Competent or Not Competent, with no letter grade and no ordinary grade point average, and performance assessment work can be revised and resubmitted with no penalty. A return costs queue days inside a six-month flat-rate term. Where a proctored objective assessment forms part of this course, we prepare only: variance and transfer pricing drills, measure design scenarios and an honest readiness verdict. We never sit an assessment and never ask for portal credentials.
Six mistakes in graduate managerial work
- Computing without consequence. A variance with no statement of what a manager should do differently answers half the aspect.
- Charging managers for uncontrollable costs. It destroys the diagnostic value of the report and demotivates the person reading it.
- Recommending a single transfer pricing rule. The right approach depends on whether an external market exists and whether capacity is constrained.
- Proposing measures without gaming analysis. Every measure can be optimized against, and naming how is the graduate-level content.
- Ignoring the cost of control. Measurement is not free, and a recommendation that ignores its own cost is incomplete.
- Treating financial measures as sufficient. They report what already happened, which is too late to manage.
Support on a course about systems
Send the rubric, the directions and the organizational scenario. The draft comes back with each computation paired to its behavioural consequence for a named manager, controllability tested for every measure proposed, transfer pricing analyzed from both the divisional and organizational view, gaming risks named for each recommended measure and the cost of the control itself accounted for. The walkthrough covers the behavioural reasoning, since that is what separates a graduate answer from an undergraduate one here.
D559 extends the territory of D101 Cost and Managerial Accounting and pairs well with D553 Data Analytics for Accountants II, where the forecasts that feed planning and control are produced.
Questions students ask about D559
Is D559 the same course as ACCT 6335?
How is D559 different from the undergraduate cost course?
Is there a correct transfer price?
Performance measurement or transfer pricing task?
Send the scenario and the rubric. Every computation arrives paired with what a named manager would actually do about it.
Where D559 sits in WGU's programs
The July 2026 catalog places this code in 1 current WGU program. Open a program page for the complete standard path and term positions. The live Degree Plan remains authoritative after transfer credit, substitutions, and mentor planning.
The assessments, one by one
The public catalog does not publish this course's PA/OA identity or task count. WGU Tutors publishes at most one PA manual per course and only from a WGU-controlled public rubric. Until that source exists, PA help begins from the student's real Course of Study and OA support remains preparation only.