TO WHAT EXTENT HAS THE ROLE OF MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING CHANGED ?

Authors Avatar

The Changing Nature of Management Accounting and the Emergence of “HYBRID” Accountants

     In the last few years, Johnson and Kaplan who are accountancy experts have debated over the extent management accounting is changing. They argued that management accounting it had not changed since the early twenties century as well as it had lost its importance for the purpose of informing manager’s decisions. Furthermore, the environment in which management accounting is exercised has changed with progress in information technology, more competitive markets, different organisational structures and new management operations.

     Since the publication of Johnson and Kaplan various new accounting techniques have been developed, such as strategic management accounting and activity based costing. Where these new modern accounting techniques have not been widely used as it is shown in many surveys. This study emphasize on functions and expectations of these “hybrid” accountants who increasingly become part of the management team within a business process, and project implications for the professional accounting bodies and its members.

    This project was based at Manchester University (UK) and consisted of a questionnaire survey, a field study of 12 companies and 8 long term case studies. The project highlighted on two objects. Firstly, discovering whether management accounting has been too slow to change notwithstanding the fast changing organisational and technological environment recently. Secondly, spotlight on the new so-called “hybrid” management accountant.

     The authors state that There were some external factors have been claimed by managers and accounting directors to influence management accounting to change. Firstly, the global competition of the economic state of the 1990s. The extent to which the claims of increased competition, rather than effects from the economic circumstance, which that is accountant and managers’ conception and how they can observe the economic climate is actual. If it does matter to increase the competition and the focusing on consumers, that can be done by just rhetoric. Secondly, the advance in information technology which is the most important factor. Computers have dominated organisations’ work one of the reasons for that is vast store ability they have and these data stored can be anglicised in many different ways. Furthermore,  the changed of organisations' structure which happened as result of economic effects. These factors shaped management to change in many ways.

Join now!

     According to the authors, there been advances in information technology in last two decades. One of these forward movements is the progress of data-base technologies which supply the capacity to store a huge amount of information in accessible ways. Furthermore, the current database can analyse information in different ways.  Information system that meets the needs of the various users can be easily designed. In addition, the managers and most of people in the organisation have PCs on their own desks. They use them to access the information they need.

       A result of these technological ...

This is a preview of the whole essay