Evolution of Management Accounting Discipline Essay

Evolution of Management Accounting discipline and its relationship with other functions in organizations The challenges of the competitive environment in the 1980s should cause us to examine our traditional cost of accounting and management control systems. The DuPont Corporation (1903) and the reorganization of General Motors (1920) provided the opportunity for major innovations in the management control of decentralized operations, including the ROI criterion for evaluation of performance and formal budgeting and incentive plans. More recent developments have included discounted cash flow analysis and the application of management science and multiperson decision theory models After the 1920s the evolution of management accounting methods reduced as interest and senior management focused on preparing and developing financial statements to meet the new reporting requirements causing from stock market failures. Then in 1970, when Japanese automobile manufacturers exerted pressure on American and European countries that interest turned to developing a more â€Å"larger in scope† management accounting that reported in quality and service rather than simply organisation unit cost performance By 1925,Almost all cost accounting methods in use at the moment had been developed. since the last sixty years there has been changes in the nature of the business environment. Despite this fact, there has been little change in designing and putting into action most cost accounting and management control procedures. For this reason it is important for people in the business area to completely understand the source of those methods, and look for ways to improve the methods to better meet the needs of today’s business environment. managerial accounting is a young discipline Compared to financial accounting. As a result, managerial accounting concepts and tools are still evolving as news ways are found to provide information that assists management. For managerial accounting to be a useful tool in the future as it has been in the recent past, managerial accounting information must be adapted to reflect those changes. Traditional management accounting systems were called cost cutting systems because they focused on accessing the cost of an important product or activity in the organization. by the late nineteenth century, rail road managers implemented large complex costing systems, that allowed them to compute the costs of carrying the different types of freight such as coal and steel. Efficiency improvement was supported by this information as well as pricing on the railroads, the first company to develop and use large quantities of financial statistics to access organizational performance is the railroads