During the selection process for potential colleges and universities, hopeful accounting majors are confronted with a variety of accounting concentrations. Where years ago there were simply accounting and finance majors, today's job market demands more specialized training and education in virtually every field. As such, many standard collegiate majors like business management, accounting, and finance have added specialized areas of study or areas of concentration for targeted job roles. One example of such a specialized field of study is the prevalence of accounting management programs. Accounting management, also known as managerial accounting or cost accounting, focuses on the internal users of accounting information.

Where a traditional accounting degree program focuses on external users of accounting information, accounting management programs instead focus on users within the organization. Traditional financial statements and other accounting information are used by outside investors, banks and financial institutions, and government regulatory or tax agencies. Data collected and organized for use by company managers, executives, and department heads to make company decisions, on the other hand, uses accounting information and statistics in a much different manner. Managerial accounting allows users to ignore or include various forms of accounting information they need in order to make time-sensitive business decisions.

For example, investors read income statements for publicly owned companies to decide if they want to invest. However, a manager at a branch location of that same company does not need income statements for the entire company. They instead need select information on just their district to gauge the local market in order to decide what products to carry, what marketing techniques to employ, and other localized decisions that impact their performance. By studying accounting management programs, students with an interest in internal accounting information can help craft the accounting information these internal users need to make their decisions.

Rather than focusing on financial reports and statements, students enrolled in accounting management programs focus on the managerial, regional, or departmental use of accounting information to aid in business decision-making. While these students still learn how to create financial statements, how to record transactions, and similar core accounting tasks, they are also taught to organize accounting data for a variety of internal uses. Students of managerial accounting are given a broad education in business administration fundamentals so they can better understand what accounting information managers and supervisors need to make their decisions. The result is a graduate with a strong grasp of accounting skills who also understands business management and the information managers need from the accounting department.