A Study Of Management Accounting Reporting Functions And The Influential Factors

Since the definition of Anthony(1965)has got cognized unanimously, management control system research gradually deals with the internal micro management issues in enterprises, and are committed to the identification of opportunities for long-term development of companies. The essential goal is to ensure that the management and staff behave for enterprise benefit maximization, so as to guarantee the realization of strategic goals. Then the importance of behavioral science becomes prominent, especially social psychology, and this inevitably highlights the dominant position of accounting control system. Therefore, accounting and finance department is considered to be the basis of the research on management control system. This has brought management accounting reporting high-profile, and the study on the management control system finally coincide with management accounting research.As part of management control system, the information system is dedicated to help discover the strategic key points and the implementation means of the control system to ensure that enterprises realize the strategic targets. As the carrier of management accounting information, management accounting reporting gradually become a most important tool to facilitate management decision-making and performance management in modern enterprises. Therefore, the enterprise managers pay more attention to the practicability of management accounting information, namely the application of management accounting reporting can effectively assist enterprises to realize strategy target and improve performance. With complication of business operating environment and globalization of resource allocation, the management accounting reporting complies with this development trend and the contents gradually strike a proper balance to cover comprehensive information to record and reflect multifaceted enterprise economic situation and business activities objectively, and is no longer limited to financial information. But companies have no obligation to disclose management accounting reporting, and the functional mechanisms is difficult to get clarified under direct observation. This research adopts questionnaire and on-the-spot interview methods and gets access to relevant data, to have an initial knowledgement of the real situation about establishment about management accounting reporting for further in-depth study. Results show that, the variety of modern management accounting methods and techniques are widely applied, and these have been documented in richen compiled contents in the management accounting reporting which have been a dynamic and integrated system constituted of budget report, cost analysis report, business analysis report and evaluation report, etc.In recent years, the formats of the reported information are being gradually diversified along with the development of information technology and informatization. But the research concludes that the functions of management accounting reporting have become a "black box" because the management accounting reporting do not have a unified and standardized format. The survey finds that businesses generally use the different formats such as graph or table to realize diversification of information expression, making management accounting reporting interpretable, easy to understand. This brings the information transformation and functional mechanism to attention, but remains to be verified.Therefore, this research explores key points that formats of management accounting reporting facilitate functioning well from the perspective of information presentation format and understandability. The purpose of this study is to statistically test the availability and effectiveness of the management accounting report in Chinese enterprises from the perspective of functional managers. The large-scale construction and manufacturing enterprises are sampled. Because of their characteristic product diversity and complexity, the internal management accounting report system is relatively sound. Then the research results will be more illuminating to other enterprises. To realize the research purpose, effective questionnaires are built to examine application status and functions needed of management accounting report, and discuss the impact mechanism. Related theory and research conclusions combined, suggestions are put forward to improve the functions of management accounting report from the aspects of the format of the information, helping optimize the management accounting report, perfect the internal management, so as to boost competitiveness.The research framework is arranged as following:The first chapter:introduction. This chapter mainly introduces the research background, research significance, research contents, research methods, research framework and possible contributions;The second chapter:literature review. This chapter reviews domestic and abroad research about the management control system. Based on cognitive adaptation theory, and cognitive psychology, this paper clarifies the relation among management accounting report and management control system and forms the questionnaires. Then the research sums correlation studies among reporting formats, information understandability and the functions of the management accounting to determine research scope;The third chapter:the theoretical analysis and the research hypothesis. This chapter analyses the three research variables, presentation, referring the management accounting report format, understandability and functions of management accounting report. Then this paper hypothetically establishes the logical relationship between three variables and sets up the research model;The fourth chapter:research design. This chapter explains how to measure explained variables, explanatory variables and control variables in questionnaire design on the basis of the existing theory of literature. The paper elaborates research methods, detailing the issuance of the questionnaire, the investigation object for statistical control and recycling, to ensure the quality and quantity of data. In the last part of this chapter, the paper establishes the regression model involving three measured variables;The fifth chapter:the study results and further analysis. This chapter sorts out the data from questionnaire and details the descriptive statistical results, to evaluate the availability of management accounting reporting and further adopts the factor analysis method to extract variables to do an empirical test about how understandability and presentation format interact to influence the functions of the management accounting reporting through single factor variance analysis methods and regression model;The sixth chapter:conclusion and further research. This chapter summarizes research conclusion, its theoretical and practical significance based on the analysis in the fifth chapter, and discusses how to perfect management accounting reporting in the future. Then the paper analyze the research limitation for future research.The empirical conclusions of this study are:The industry difference affects the availability of management accounting reporting. Enterprises lay particular stress on some reports to adjust according to operational environmental requirements. Today many research weigh much on "decision-making usefulness" of management accounting information, but in practice most enterprises also emphases the control and incentive function according to the characteristics of the enterprise itself.From the perspective of the management accounting report format, presentation, and understandability, the data shows the enterprises use graph or table or other ways to present management accounting information, to improve readability and understandability of texts. Data analysis shows that the diversification of presentation format has positive relation with the decision-making function, control function and incentive function of management accounting reporting. Understandability has the mediation effect during this. The conclusions clearly open the "black box" how presentation format and understandability interact to influence the functions of management accounting report.This study investigates the mechanism of how information presentation format influences functions of management accounting reporting and come to the conclusions which have a certain universality to improve management practice. This complements and expands the research in the field of management accounting information. This study explores the interactive mechanism from the perspective of reporting format and information understandability. The research conclusions provide a basic theoretical and empirical support for management accounting report usage and control management.The characteristics and contributions in this research:First, on the research content, this paper innovatively studies how management accounting report format influences the functions of the management accounting report mechanism. The feature contributions are to study functions of the management accounting report from the perspective of presentation format and understandability based on the cognition of information users. According to the theory of cognitive psychology and graphics processing,the presentation format of management accounting reporting can significantly improve the decision-making, control and incentive function of management accounting reporting through the channel variable--information understandability.Second, on the research perspective, this paper establishes hypothesis models based on information processing model, and the theory of cognitive adaptation and analyzes the influencing factors on functions of management accounting reporting, step by step, to reveal the mechanism to implement the management accounting report functions. This provides the theoretical and practical support for management accounting report usage. This paper focuses on the improvement of the management accounting report form and has practical enlightenment about how to adapt to the enterprise operation and management efficiently.Third, on the research logics, this paper stresses the practical application of management accounting reporting, and focuses on the mechanism to implement management accounting report functions from the perspective of information users. The conclusions provide a profound management implications for application of management accounting reporting. This paper sets up intermediary effect and mediated effect model to discuss how presentation format of management accounting report influences decision function, control function and incentive function of management accounting report. This helps to see objectively, understand phenomenon and put forward research questions to analyze and solve problems, in order to realize the value of research.Fourth, on questionnaire design, this paper reasonably chooses variables by referring to mature foreign literature about management accounting report, and combining with the practical application of the management accounting reporting and information transmission mechanism. The research chooses large representative enterprises, to obtain qualified research data depending on the national natural science fund project resources, to ensure the accuracy and credibility of the survey data.