Adoption and Benefits of Management Accounting Practices: An Australian Study

Abstract

This paper uses a survey to identify the extent to which Australian manufacturing firms have adopted certain traditional and recently-developed management accounting practices, the benefits received from those practices and the intentions to emphasise certain management accounting practices in the future. The findings indicate that, overall, the rates of adoption of traditional management accounting practices were higher than recently-developed techniques. However, newer techniques, such as activity-based costing, were more widely adopted than found in prior surveys. Also, the benefits obtained from traditional management accounting techniques were higher than those of newer techniques. The evidence suggests that the majority of large Australian firms have adopted a range of management accounting techniques that emphasise non-financial information, and take a more strategic focus.

JEL Classification: M40, M46