Question

Discuss the Damitio and Schmidgal article in terms of its insights and how the concepts in managerial accounting are used/applied in the workplace.

Answer 1

Competitive pressures in the U.S. economy keep demanding that accounting managers and nonaccounting managers work closely together if their companies are to generate adequate profits. As we all know, management accounting provides managers with information they can use to make better decisions, to choose strategies, and to determine how to implement those strategies. What will be particularly critical to the future success of any business is for managers working with controllers to use key management accounting skills.

Obviously, management accounting skills are important to controllers, but how important do nonaccounting managers perceive these skills to be in performing their overall duties? As controllers and managers work together to achieve the entity's objectives, how do the two groups view the importance of management accounting skills to managers? Do they agree?

We attempted to provide some answers to these questions by surveying a group of managers and a group of controllers in one segment of the economy[mdash]namely, the lodging industry. Although our study involved only one segment, we believe that nonac-counting managers and controllers in any segment of the economy are facing the same challenges in working together to achieve organizational goals.

Our survey

How did we conduct our survey? We mailed questionnaires to a sample of 500 managers and a sample of 560 controllers in the lodging industry, asking them to rate the importance to managers of a list of management accounting skills using a five-point Likert scale with "5" being the "most important" and "1" being "not important."

Table 1 shows the controllers' ranking of the 24 skills. They rated the income statement, operating budgets, and analysis of variances, respectively, as the top three skills for nonaccounting managers. Controllers also rated financial forecasting, accounting controls, and spreadsheets as numbers 4 through 6 in importance to the non-accounting managers. None of the 24 skills in the list was rated "not important" by the controllers.

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