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1.1 What Are Accounts For? Overview The purpose of accounts is to reveal performance in the conduct of a business or other activity concerned with use of economic resources (e.g. a club). It is thus a matter of stewardship. Although, like economics, it is necessary in accounting to use money as a measure of performance, it is concerned with the individual organisation rather than with economic phenomena as a whole.

Preface The functions of business divide into several areas and the general focus of this book is on one of the most important although least understood of these—DISTRIBUTION. The particular focus is on reviewing current practice in distribution costing and on attempting to push the frontiers back a little by suggesting some new approaches to overcome previously defined shortcomings.

Traditional management accounting techniques such as standard costing and variance analysis, traditional budgeting and cost volume profit analysis are said to be less useful in the present manufacturing environment. To succeed in the present dynamic business environment, tools or strategies such as JIT, ABC, TQM, process re‐engineering, life cycle assessment and target costing would greatly enhance the ability of corporations to meet global competition. Through a literature review, this study examines the extent to which traditional and contemporary management accounting tools are being used in four Asian countries: Singapore, Malaysia, China and India. Overall, the evidence reviewed suggests that the use of contemporary management accounting tools is lacking in the four countries. The use of traditional management accounting techniques remains strong. The paper concludes with various recommendations for future research, the most important of which is the need for future studies to be grounded in theory.

Sees the objective of teaching financial management to be to help managers and potential managers to make sensible investment and financing decisions. Acknowledges that financial theory teaches that investment and financing decisions should be based on cash flow and risk. Provides information on payback period; return on capital employed, earnings per share effect, working capital, profit planning, standard costing, financial statement planning and ratio analysis. Seeks to combine the practical rules of thumb of the traditionalists with the ideas of the financial theorists to form a balanced approach to practical financial management for MBA students, financial managers and undergraduates.

This study extends prior research by proposing a more complete model of the process by which budget slack is created in the organization. The research model proposed in this study suggests that there is an ex-ante as well as an ex-post process by which budget slack is created. In the ex-ante process, environmental uncertainty and budget participation are linked to managers’ propensity to create slack through job-relevant information (JRI). In the ex-post process, the control system determines the slack in the final budget by providing information to superiors about a manager’s performance capability. Thus, the propensity to create slack determines actual slack to the extent that the organization’s control system fails to provide an effective assessment of the manager’s performance capability.

Contrary to expectations, the ex-ante model indicated that participation has a direct, negative effect on propensity to create slack. The largest effect on propensity to create slack, however, was a direct positive link from environmental uncertainty. In the ex-post process, the link between propensity to create slack and segment slack (actual slack created) was moderated by the organization’s control system capabilities. When propensity to create slack is low (high), control system monitoring has little (a great) effect on segment slack created. This finding is consistent with arguments that publicly available information about a manager’s performance capability motivates a higher budget standard.

The 1990s brought major budget and management reform to the State of Florida. Foremost among the reforms was performance-based program budgeting, brought about by the 1994 passage of the Government Performance and Accountability Act (GPAA). The Act established a number of supports for a complete performance-based budgeting system including citizen-driven benchmark development, creation of performance indicators, performance measurement, outcome reporting, and program evaluation and justification reviews. This paper addresses the output and outcome measures used to tie performance standards to budget appropriations and to evaluate programs after they have been on performance-based program budgeting for a year.

TIME and Motion/Work Study faces a major issue today and it has got to be solved—quickly. Either it rises in a unified manner to the tasks Industry has allotted it, or it expends itself in shrill quarrels about controlling its destiny.

The Nature of Business Policy Business policy — or general management — is concerned with the following six major functions:

This case study investigates the contention that the Commonwealth Grants Commission, through the methods and procedures it employed to determine the special grants it recommended for payment to Western Australia, was influential in education policy formulation in that State. Although certain benefits were gained for education in relation to the level of finance expended on it, the State surrendered a considerable degree of its control over the direction which educational expenditure could have taken because it depended on the special grants to balance its budget during its period of claimancy.

The Minimum Income Standard (MIS) research gives an insight into living standards in the United Kingdom, and provides a way of tracking the adequacy of incomes over time. As such it offers useful context for discussions of inequality. At the core of the research are deliberative groups held with members of the public who identify and discuss the goods and services that are considered necessary for a living standard that provides a socially acceptable minimum. Groups decide not only what is enough to maintain health and well-being, but also what is needed for social inclusion. This chapter begins with an outline of MIS before exploring what the qualitative data from the research tell us about how people conceptualise socially acceptable living standards. These data also reveal how particular items, opportunities and choices are considered important in enabling individuals to feel socially included and how that has changed over time. The chapter then looks at how this living standard relates to UK household incomes and at the adequacy of income relative to MIS, in the years following the recession. We identify the groups at greatest risk of having inadequate incomes and explore how this risk has changed during a period in which there has been a sustained decline in living standards. In combining qualitative and quantitative findings from a decade of research, this chapter provides rich insight into living standards and their relation to income within the United Kingdom.