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An Evolution: Turning Management Accounting into a Strategic Function

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Effective Implementation of Transformation Strategies

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Abstract

In the past, management accounting was the set of techniques accountants used to analyse and reinterpret financial data to help other managers understand the decisions they needed to make to achieve their organisation’s goals. Because the decisions made were mostly centred on the different ways the organisation could achieve greater levels of efficiency, management accounting was not considered to be very strategic. However, with the increasing need to establish links between strategic management and operations through financial information to understand if strategy is being effectively implemented, an evolution occurred. Management accounting turned into strategic management accounting, a function that was designed to help managers make strategic management, operational management, organisational design, financial and capital management decisions or combinations of these. This chapter elaborates on what this involves with a special emphasis on how integral strategic management accounting is when enabling the organisation’s decision-makers to effectively implement a strategy.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia

    Mark Pickering

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  1. Mark Pickering
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Correspondence to Mark Pickering .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

    Angelina Zubac

  2. University of Essex, Colchester, UK

    Danielle Tucker

  3. Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia

    Ofer Zwikael

  4. Technological University Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Kate Hughes

  5. The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA

    Shelley Kirkpatrick

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Pickering, M. (2022). An Evolution: Turning Management Accounting into a Strategic Function. In: Zubac, A., Tucker, D., Zwikael, O., Hughes, K., Kirkpatrick, S. (eds) Effective Implementation of Transformation Strategies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2336-4_8

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