Management Accounting and ERP Systems : Factors behind the Choice of Information Systems when Exercising Management Accounting

Abstract: Accounting is an old discipline inherent to any business. Accounting is divided into Financial Accounting (FA) and Management Accounting (MA). Financial Accounting focuses on the pure processing of the economic data. Management Accounting focuses on the decision-making aspects of the accounting. Accounting industry has been tremendously transformed in the past two decades due to the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. These systems integrate and unify an organisation’s business functions and processes into one complex computer system. Previous research suggests that the ERP systems’ main functionality primarily addresses the issues of Financial Accounting and much less the issues of Management Accounting. The purpose of this study is to explore the underlying factors behind the application of the Management Accounting Techniques through the ERP systems and to suggest a further development in the field. Five large Swedish companies were examined through the comparative case studies with semi-structured interviews. This study discovered that MATs were mostly implemented through spreadsheets, BI systems and custom-built software, i.e. outside of the ERP systems. The main reasons were inflexibility and standard design of the ERP systems, that did not fully suit the companies. Additionally, the customization of the ERP systems would be too costly when other tools, such as BI systems or spreadsheets, provided better functionality to a better price. The conclusion of this study is that it is impossible to build a universal ERP system that would suit all kind of companies, however, ERP systems can serve as a common base and a transaction engine for the MA. ERP systems can provide a data structure for the analysis parameters crucial to MA, such as profit centre, cost centre, unit, and other dimensionality aspects. Spreadsheets and BI systems win the MA battle by providing the flexibility, user-friendliness and the acceptable price, required by the users. Therefore, ERP systems must provide good integration possibilities with other software. One can further speculate if ERP system providers choose not to deliver flexible and visually appealing products, since they benefit from the income that the customer education and the customization of an ERP system implies.