The articles and papers reprinted in this volume, all written after 1970, represent a departure from the earlier conventional notion of accounting history research. They approach the study of management accounting history by regarding the accounting and business records of actual organizations as indispensable source materials for historical analysis. Analysis of these records has yielded a new conception of management accounting. These studies suggest that the forces contributing to management accounting’s development are more numerous and complex than historians had realized. The case studies in the first part of the book trace the historical development of virtually all the internal accounting practices associated today with management accounting. Those in the second section consist of articles which interpret the case material.

In The History of Cost and Management Accounting, two leading international scholars provide a comprehensive survey of the literature on costing and management accounting. This compelling guide covers the development of British accounting from the late 19th century to recent years, and offers a balanced review of changing theories and practices.

There is growing interest in the history of accounting amongst both accounting practitioners and accounting academics. This interest developed steadily from about 1970 and really ‘took off’ in the 1990s. However, there is a lack of texts dealing with major aspects of accounting history that can be used in classrooms, to inform new researchers, and to provide a source of reference for established researchers.The great deal of research into cost and management accounting in Britain published in academic journals over the last twenty years–including the authors' own contributions–makes The History of Cost and Management Accounting an essential contribution to the field.

The articles and papers reprinted in this volume, all written after 1970, represent a departure from the earlier conventional notion of accounting history research. They approach the study of management accounting history by regarding the accounting and business records of actual organizations as indispensable source materials for historical analysis. Analysis of these records has yielded a new conception of management accounting. These studies suggest that the forces contributing to management accounting’s development are more numerous and complex than historians had realized. The case studies in the first part of the book trace the historical development of virtually all the internal accounting practices associated today with management accounting. Those in the second section consist of articles which interpret the case material.

Only Trends Matter A step change in management accounting This is not just a book for accountants; it is directed to all managers in all types of organization, commercial, public, charitable or social, that receive regular profit and loss or income and expenditure statements otherwise known as management accounts. They are the most ubiquitous financial report used in the world today. The author is not an academic and all managers, whatever their discipline should be able to relate to it. Although the author was originally a management accountant he spent the majority of his career in general management so has experienced management accounts from both perspectives. As a CEO he recognized that much time was being wasted at board meetings discussing history, prompted by the management accounts and this instigated his research to find a way of transforming management accounts into a modern day and invaluable management tool. There is a dearth of publications addressing the presentation and format of financial information despite the fact that unless it is comprehensible it is of little use as a management report. Some good managers admit that they find numerous columns of numbers difficult to understand and many dont admit it at all. It appears to be a subject that accountants give limited consideration to, and it is staggering that despite monumental changes in business technology the format and content of management accounts has changed little over 50 years or more. The book reveals that management accounts are commonly criticised by managers for being too little, too late to help them manage their day to day activities but criticism of management accounting techniques is not new, Johnson and Kaplan in their renowned book Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, 1987, could not have phrased it better. Todays management accounting information, driven by the procedures and cycle of the organizations financial reporting system, is too late, too aggregated, and too distorted to be relevant for managers planning and control decisions.

First published in 1996. This book summarises the Seminar held in Edinburgh in 1994 in the five hundredth year since the publication of Luca Pacioli's Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita. Its purpose is simple but relevant to every accountant. It revisits some fundamentals that lay behind Pacioli's decision to write his Summa, and examines whether the accounting framework in which we work today has overlooked basic issues because of its continued focus on development of the existing financial accounting model. It analyses Pacioli's legacy from several different perspectives, deliberately choosing to do so in ways that addressed considerations that his work reflected, examining the nature and characteristics of the bridge between academic analysis and insight on the one hand and practical application on the other. It also looks at the dominant influences in the evolution of accountancy for managing stewardship and for reporting of that stewardship. By doing so, it attempts to identify influences that had been less pressing and so had been ignored or overlooked, and also considers how changing technology has affected the way we manage the accountancy process.