会计学英汉对译文章.docx

1、会计学英汉对译文章Management Accounting Any organization, whether public or private, has to live within financial constraints and to deliver perceived value for money to its stakeholders. The role of the finance function is to manage the financial resources of the organization, and to ensure that the financi

2、al constraints it faces are not breached. Failure to do this will lead to financial distress, and ultimately, for many organizations, to financial failure or bankruptcy. Establishment of precisely what the financial constraints are and how the proposed operating plans will impact upon them are a cen

3、tral part of the finance function. There are three main areas of focus for financial plans. Most basically, cash flow planning is required to ensure that the cash is available to meet the financial obligations of the organization. Failure to manage cash flows will result in technical insolvency. For

4、 business organizations, the second area requiring attention is profitability, or the need to acquire resources at a greater rate than using them. Although over the life of an enterprise, total net cash flow and total profit are essentially equal, this can mask the fact that in the short-term they c

5、an be very different.Indeed, one of the major causes of failure of new small business enterprises is not that they are unprofitable in the long term, but that growth in profitable activity has outstripped the cash necessary to resource it. The major difference between profit and cash flow is the tim

6、e period between payments made for capital assets which will generate income in the future and the actual receipt of that income which is needed as working capital. This highlights the third area of focus, namely on assets and the provision of finance for their purchase. Businesses need to know abou

7、t their financial performance to access what are the things they are doing right. The paper takes a look at the two forms of accounting systems. The paper will also discuss on the concern towards the financial and management accountings linkage and such linkage drawing operating decision making into

8、 a short-term, narrow focus not supportive of the most effective operations. 1. Management accountingMany companies have turned to their management accounting systems to bypass the limitations of financial accounting. Some of them have developed best practices that give them a firm foundation for tr

9、ue accountability. However, many companies have not gotten beyond the crisis in management accounting that crept into place early in the century. That is, they use management accounting as not much more than a data-gathering device for determining product costs and compiling external financial accou

10、nts. Management accounts are driven by the cycle and procedures of financial accounting. The information is most useful for tasks like valuing inventory and aggregating costs across the company.It is an incomplete basis for measuring performance. Any company that has not radically changed its manage

11、ment accounting risks finding it produces problems similar to those created by financial accounting. The two most critical problems are prodding managers into, first, an incessant financial focus and, second, a near total reliance on historical, or lagging, indicators for decision making. The produc

12、t and service costs that managers receive, the meat and potatoes of managerial accounting, often reveal little about the non financial factors of performance that create costs, like complex product designs or defective customer service. The cost data help managers keep the financial score but not ne

13、cessarily how to improve their long-term batting average companies that depend on financial accounting and traditional management accounting systems are in crisis because they are missing the first element for making the accountable organization which is relevant and comprehensive measures of perfor

14、mance. Without systems that extend beyond the financials to non financials and that accurately tally product costs, few managers or executives can deliver a maximum of value to shareholders, customers, or anyone else.Managers widely recognize the problem today. In a study 45 percent of companies sai

15、d that their performance measurement system had a neutral to negative impact on long-term management. Whats more, respondents who reported the least satisfaction with their performance measurement systems used financials more intensely and used fewer non financials than did respondents who reported

16、more satisfaction. Little surprise that 65 percent said most of their measures came from the current-year financial results. Measures have great power, almost like genetic code, to shape action and performance. Whether at the equivalent of the cell level, the organ level, or the systems level, measu

17、res become the directional device that influences or even dictates the shape of the enterprise. Change the measures, and you change the organism. Measures have always had the power to shape a corporations destiny, but the focus on financial figures alone limited their utility.Management accounting o

18、f the past forced managers to build world-class organizations and it is build with a truncated set of chromosomes. Today, though, with the help of revitalized cost accounting and non financial measurement, managers can develop a full set of instructions financial, operational, and social for the ent

19、erprise. Those instructions give them the capability to create accountability they never had before. The mark of the financially accountable organization has changed. Once upon a time, standard accounting measures like earnings per share were the gold standards of performance measurement. Traditiona

20、l measures today, if used in isolation, raise a red flag. They signal to investors that managers may be reporting their performance reflexively as slaves to tradition, rather than as leaders of a well-wrought financial and business strategy. As a complement to financial accounting, companies make us

21、e of management accounting to check its performance and know which operating part of the firm they are not doing well.2. Improvements in management and financial accounting.There is mounting evidence that the deployment of digital technologies by organizations not only affects the economics of opera

22、tional and managerial processes but also mobilizes extensive social and organizational effects. Digitization impacts the form, substance, and provenance of internal accounting information with attendant consequences on the behavior and actions of organizational participants and on the functioning of

23、 enterprises more widely. Knowledge about the influence of the deployment of digital technologies on management accounting thinking, processes, and practices is starting to take shape. As enterprises become increasingly concerned with the generation and the processing of digitized information relati

24、ng to the production and delivery of physical and digital products and services, the challenge will be to sustain sufficient credence in the monitoring, measurement, and assessment of these altering organizational activities.Trust is core in this regard. If it can be claimed that trust is becoming t

25、he most important asset in the digital economy then what comprises trust in internal accountings will likely see transformations. Novel accounting concerns centering on faith in numbers will once again emerge and contemporary control systems will no doubt continue to face calls for reforms. Accounti

26、ng measures will seek to endanger trust in contexts where what is bought, sold, or produced never assumes physical form. Although service products have always evidenced such characterization, the means by which they are delivered have not ordinarily defied desired transparency or the potential for o

27、bservation in the same way as digital processes. Counting based on observation or observations enabling evaluations to be made are not always amenable to operationalization in contexts where digital rather than physical transactions underpin enterprise activities.Digital processes often evade physic

28、al verification, and established modes of enumeration and evaluation will therefore likely come under question. How far accounting information can be trusted is not subject merely to the development of more rational forms of capturing the economic consequences of organizational activities resting on

29、 digital processes. Human interpretations of the significance of deploying digital technologies and their representation in economic terms are also a relevant issue. Alterations in the capture and reporting of information as well as the changing nature of the product that is to be reported upon with

30、in digitized organizational contexts will likely have behavioral implications worthy of study. Behavioral accounting research which has traditionally documented similarities and variations in the uses and impacts of accounting information on individuals will raise new concerns, questions, and issues

31、.At the individual level, digitization will affect the type of accounting information being reported as well as the manner in which it is used and the resulting consequences. The rise of digitization which may in part occlude the transparency of organizational affairs, will impact on pressures to po

32、rtray management accounting work as being technically and internally legitimate. This will prove particularly pertinent in the near future given that, in the recent past, the accountants credibility in public accounting functions has been tarnished. Just as consumers rely on brands to guide their ch

33、oices as product diversity and complexity grow, and as barriers to entry in many markets drop, so the linkage between the managerial task and the know-how of internal accountants will be shaped by the credibility which management accounting can engender within enterprises. The management accountant will need to project not simply traditional professionalism but the