Educational standards for management accountants: A critical need

The last five years have seen the development of a trend that may be characterized as “the professionalization of accounting education”. One major element of this movement has been the development of a formal recommended curriculum for students planning a career in public accounting. However, a similar proposed curriculum for management accounting students has not resulted. Although the management accounting profession has made great advances during the past few years, a single formal recommended curriculum has not been developed.This article expresses concern over the lack of such a curriculum, and urges the management accounting arm of the profession to join in developing a single recommended academic curriculum for management accountants.     

Priorities for the development of vocational skills in management accountants: A European perspective

In recent years there have been many calls for a re-orientation of accounting education in order to include the development of competencies such as communication, group working, and problem solving skills. However, concern has been expressed that the proposed changes are possibly biased towards the interests of public accounting employers. This paper presents and compares the opinions of the employers of management accountants in Spain and the UK, and then by using a weighted importance indicator determines vocational skills development priorities. The factors that the Spanish and UK employers identified as major constraints to the development of vocational skills are also compared.     

Spreadsheet usage by management accountants: An exploratory study

Spreadsheets play an important role for managerial accountants. For these practitioners, spreadsheets are necessary tools for traditional responsibilities such as planning, budgeting, forecasting as well as newer decision-making responsibilities. Responsibilities for managerial accounting practitioners have shifted from a transaction-based focus to an emphasis on decision support, planning, and control. Managerial accountants are expected to be key members of decision making and cross-functional teams outside the accounting area. Spreadsheets are major tools for meeting these new responsibilities.     

Professional accountants and the development of a management accounting service for the small firm: barriers and possibilities

This paper reports the results of a qualitative study examining the potential for the provision of a management accounting service for smaller companies by accountants in professional practice. The study aimed to determine the management information needs of owner-managers, the type and frequency of information preferred and the capacity of professional accountants to contribute to these needs. The owner-managers of 15 smaller companies were asked to participate in semi-strucutured interviews during which their use of computers to provide management accounts, their relationship with their accountant and their financial skills were discussed. The respondents were presented with a range of management information including statutory final accounts, interim accounts, cash statements, ratios and graphical comparisons of monthly turnover figures in order to assess their financial information skills and needs. The study found that companies used computers for the preparation of management accounting information, but usually not to their full potential. The financial awareness of owner-managers varied considerably. There was a favourable response to the presentation of ratios and graphs, however, it was felt that an explanation or interpretation of financial information by their accountant would be a useful addition to improve their understanding and therefore aid their business. The study concludes that there appears to be significant potential for accountants to expand the management accounting services they provide to smaller companies, especially where information is presented as ratios or graphs and accompanied with an appropriate narrative interpretation. This would also increase the financial skills of their clients and result in an increased demand for management accounting services.     

Role conflicts of management accountants and their position within organisation structures

The research examines accountants' and managers' perceptions of management accounting roles under conditions of centralisation and decentralisation of the management accounting function. Decentralization was associated with greater interaction between accountants and other managers and with the provision of accounting information perceived as being more pertinent to managerial needs. However, whatever the structural relationship, there were criticisms of the accountants' passivity in management. Contrary to expectations neither interpersonal relationships nor excessive power of accountants were problematical, nor did many accountants show bureaucratic orientations. Their inability to meet service expectations were perhaps, related to ambiguity and stress emanating from the accounting workflows.     

Enterprise Resource Planning and a contest to limit the role of management accountants: A strong structuration perspective

The implementation and use of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems raise fundamental questions about the role of management accountants in an organisation. The case studied here, involving an attempt to establish an ERP system in an organisation funded by both the European Union (EU) and the Egyptian government, is an exploration of conflicting beliefs about the role of management accountants. Elements of strong structuration theory (a reinforced version of Giddens’ structuration theory) are used to analyse how the contest over the role of the management accountant in a new organisation was played out during the partially successful attempt to establish ERP in conjunction with a system that was felt to better support the requirements of the EU for performance-based budgeting. Despite the forward-looking dispositions of key actors within the organisation and from the EU, the role of the management accountant here became compressed to the traditional one of cost information collector and provider.     

Infantile mortality from an actuarial point of view

Abstract

1. The difficulties by which the actuary is confronted in dealing with infantile mortality resemble in several ways the difficulties experienced at extreme old age. In both cases the variation in the mortality is so rapid that the usual formulas of numerical approximation may break down. In both cases the observations of the life insurance companies are scarce, and hypothesis must therefore be resorted to. In both cases there is a question of convergence, if the force of mortality is assumed to tend to infinity, as the age tends to zero. In both cases it is, of course, impossible to tell with certainty whether the force of mortality does actually tend to infinity.     

注册会计师和内部审计师在公司治理结构中的作用

什么是"公司治理结构"?简而言之,公司治理结构意味着健全的管理、透明度和披露.就公司而言,公司治理结构是指确定管理当局、董事会、股东以及其他证券持有者之间的关系,由此实现透明度、经营责任和公平的目标和理想.     

注册会计师监盘的难点与对策

监盘是注册会计师执业过程中常用的审计策略和手段.监盘的对象通常包括现金、票据、交易性金融资产、存货和固定资产等在内的实物资产.通过对实物资产的监盘,能获取判断监盘对象存在性、完整性、权利性、估价或分摊、分类与披露的认定是否恰当的审计证据.     

The mystery of the missing members: the first 600 chartered accountants in England and Wales

There are a number of factual errors within the authoritative literature on the history of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and of its five founder bodies. The aim of this article is to outline some of these errors, explain how and why they arose, and attempt to correct them. Its primary concern is to establish the membership of these early professional accountancy bodies at the time of the granting of a royal charter in May 1880.     

Optimal proportional reinsurance from the point of view of cedent and reinsurer

In the reinsurance market, the cedent and the reinsurer make their subjective evaluations of the utility and riskiness of the financial operations covered by a treaty by deriving preference rankings of the different kinds of agreements. If both the cedent and the reinsurer evaluate the operation underlying the treaty by means of their utility functions and adopt the criterion based on the comparison between the expected utilities in order to take into account the subjective attitude toward risk, then the indifference prices play a crucial role because they define the preference thresholds of the exchange, thus restricting the range of variability of the reinsurance price. By using an analytical approach, this paper examines the above problem identifying the margins for achieving Pareto-optimal solutions in trading insurance risks.     

Traditional accountants and business professionals: Portraying the accounting profession after Enron

Society’s perception of the legitimacy of the accounting profession and its members is grounded in the verbal and visual images of accountants that are projected not only by accountants themselves but also by the media. The paper uses the critical literature on stereotypes to examine how books written for a general readership on Enron and other recent corporate failures portray accountants and accounting, and the implications their authors draw for corporate governance and the survival of the financial system. The paper explores how commentators have analyzed the changing activities of accountants (including the rise of consulting) and have contrasted the personalities of “founding fathers” of the US accounting profession with their early 21st-century successors. The paper concludes that changing stereotypes of accountants are evidence of “negative signals of movement” for accounting as a profession.     

基于银行发展战略的数据中心管理

随着信息技术的不断发展,银行数据中心环境越来越复杂,各种业务对数据中心系统的依赖性越来越高。数据中心系统能否正常运行直接关系到银行的正常运转,传统的依靠人工被动发现问题和解决问题的工作模式已不能满足数据中心发展和业务发展的要求。要从银行发展战略的角度出发．丰富数据中心的管理内涵．不仅要管理好机房环境、主机、系统、数据库、应用软件和技术人员、     

The effects of ethnic culture and organizational culture on judgments of accountants

This study extends prior cross-cultural research by examining the effects of ethnic culture and organizational culture (Big 4 and non-Big 4 accounting firm affiliations) on the judgments of accountants in Fiji. The study also examines how interaction between ethnic culture and organizational culture influences the judgments of accountants. It examines the extent and the cause of differences between the judgments of Ethnic Fijian and Indo-Fijian accountants when interpreting and applying selected International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRSs). Consistent with their ethnic cultural values, the results show that Indo-Fijian accountants are generally more conservative in their judgments than their Ethnic Fijian counterparts. This study provides empirical evidence to support the view that both ethnic culture and organizational culture have a significant effect on the manner in which accountants within a country interpret uncertainty expressions contained in the IFRSs. The results also show that organizational culture has a greater effect on the judgments of accountants than ethnic culture. The results of this study provide important insights into the factors affecting the judgments of accountants within a country and raise interesting theoretical issues.     

The strategic competence of accountants and middle managers in budget making

This paper aims to advance the notion of the “situated functionality of numbers” (Ahrens & Chapman, 2007) by investigating the practical knowledge of strategy which shapes the calculations performed by accountants and middle managers when they are making a budget. It proposes an in-depth investigation of the budgeting conversations collected during an extensive field study in a large construction firm that had undertaken a new partnership strategy. Drawing on a conversation analytical approach, it identifies three micro-practices of calculation constitutive of the accountants’ and middle managers’ strategic competence: invoking the usefulness of numbers to activate local projects; constructing the acceptability of numbers to report them to external partners; authorising the plausibility of numbers to reconcile local contingencies and global coherence. The paper then explores how accountants and middle managers come to a mutual understanding of their respective accountabilities when they perform their strategic competence. It ends by discussing the unintended consequences of these transformations in their professional roles.     

Informal mentoring relationships and the career processes of public accountants

Research has shown that informal mentoring relationships benefit the protégé, mentor and employing organisation. As such they have been of interest to public accounting firms. The functioning of these relationships in Big Eight/Big Five accounting firms has been investigated in the USA and more recently in Ireland. The career outcome of most interest has been turnover intentions. This paper reports the results of a questionnaire study of mentoring relationships in the Australian state of Queensland. The receipt of mentoring support by accountants is found to be associated with not only lower turnover intentions, but also higher job satisfaction, and lower intentions of female accountants to seek part-time employment. The impact of the organisational context in which these relationships are initiated and cultivated is also investigated. The size of the accounting firm and the national culture of the country in which the firm operates, appear to have some bearing on mentoring experiences.     

推行全面质量管理提高审计业务质量

脱钩改制之后,我国会计师事务所面临着两大挑战,一是失去了原挂靠单位的呵护,审计风险日益增大,二是加入WTO后,外国会计公司将冲击中国会计市场,业务竞争日益加大.