Article review of “Data analytics by management accountants”: for advanced management accounting study

Article review of “Data analytics by management accountants”: for advanced management accounting study

 

How to present this article in Harvard reference format?

Spraakman, G., Sanchez-Rodriguez, C. and Tuck-Riggs, C.A., 2020. Data analytics by management accountants. Qualitative Research in Accounting & Management, [online] Available at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1176-6093.htm

 

 What are the key research issues the article wants to address?

The article aims to address three key interrelated research questions (RQs) concerning the use of data analytics (DA) by management accountants (MA):

1.    What are the responsibilities of management accountants with respect to data analytics? This includes understanding whether more focused roles within management accounting are required in the context of DA.

2.    How does data analytics support inference, prediction, and assurance in management accounting tasks?

3.    How can management accountants ensure that data insights derived from data analytics are effectively turned into decisions that add value?

These research questions are designed to deepen the understanding of how the tasks and responsibilities of management accountants are affected by data analytics, moving beyond conceptual discussions to explore actual practices

 

Describe two main theories employed in this article.

The article primarily focuses on exploring the practical application of data analytics (DA) by management accountants (MA) rather than explicitly employing traditional formal theories. However, it builds its research framework and analysis based on two conceptual foundations or theoretical perspectives implicit in its approach:

1.    Management Accounting Theory: The article relies on an established definition of management accounting from the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), which frames management accounting as a profession that involves partnering in management decision making, devising planning and performance systems, and providing expertise in financial reporting and control to assist in strategy formulation and implementation. This theoretical foundation infers that management accounting involves both financial and non-financial information, including external data, which is crucial for understanding the role of DA in expanding or changing MA responsibilities.

2.    Data Analytics Frameworks in Accounting: The paper draws on conceptualizations of data analytics as the use of information technology tools to perform data analysis, which ranges from simple descriptive statistics to more advanced analytical methods like clustering, regression, and factor analysis. It references perspectives from researchers like Pickard and Cokins (2017) and Schneider et al. (2015), which highlight DA's roles in enabling inference, prediction, and assurance within accounting tasks. This theoretical lens frames how DA supports management accountants in transforming raw data into actionable insights and supporting decision-making processes.

Thus, the article situates its research by combining a well-established definition of management accounting with emerging conceptual frameworks of data analytics in accounting research to examine how these intersect in practice. It does not explicitly apply formal theories but operates within these conceptual constructs to analyze empirical findings.

 

Describe 3 main claims of the article in terms of Toulmin's model of argument.

Using Toulmin’s model of argument, which includes Claim, Data (Evidence), Warrant (the reasoning connecting data and claim), Backing, Qualifier, and Rebuttal, the article’s three main claims can be described as follows:

1.    Claim 1: The responsibilities of management accountants (MA) have not fundamentally changed due to data analytics (DA), but their roles have expanded, particularly in data preparation and communication of analytic results.

• Data: Interviews with 29 MAs from 20 organizations show that MAs continue to analyze financial and non-financial data to support senior management but are increasingly preparing data for analytics and presenting results visually and clearly.
• Warrant: Because DA tools enable more detailed and complex analysis, MAs must expand their skills not only in technical analysis but also in effectively communicating insights to decision-makers.
• Backing: Literature citing the need for accountants to develop DA knowledge and skills supports this, as well as empirical findings showing expanded roles of MA.
• Qualifier: Though roles are generally expanding, adoption and use of DA vary significantly among organizations.
• Rebuttal: Some organizations remain traditional in their accounting approach, applying DA only modestly or not at all.

2.    Claim 2: Data analytics supports management accounting tasks by enhancing inference, prediction, and assurance, but adoption of advanced predictive analytics remains low.

• Data: Respondents predominantly use drill-down and trend analysis with financial and operational data; few use predictive analytics, which is still described as being in infancy and unfamiliar to many MAs.
• Warrant: Advanced DA techniques require skills and organizational readiness not yet widespread among MAs; Excel and ERP systems currently dominate as tools for data analysis.
• Backing: Prior research highlights the potential of DA for predictive accounting, but empirical evidence shows limited practical use so far.
• Qualifier: The potential for prediction is significant, but actual use is limited due to skill gaps and managerial focus on current state issues.
• Rebuttal: Some organizations and units (e.g., hospital 13) show advanced DA use including predictive analytics, indicating growing but uneven adoption.

3.    Claim 3: For data analytics to add value through MA, success factors include business knowledge, a cross-functional analytical perspective, and effective communication skills.

• Data: Interviewees emphasized the importance of understanding the broader business context, linking data across systems, and presenting findings clearly to senior management using visual tools.
• Warrant: Having technical analytic skills alone is insufficient; MA must translate data insights into actionable decisions, which requires these additional competencies.
• Backing: The difficulty in finding individuals with combined technical, domain, and communication skills is noted in prior literature and confirmed by respondents.
• Qualifier: These factors increase the likelihood of DA insights being turned into value-adding decisions.
• Rebuttal: Without such skills and perspectives, DA risks producing data overload or unhelpful results.

These claims integrate empirical evidence from qualitative interviews with literature-based reasoning to articulate the evolving role and effectiveness of management accountants using data analytics.

 ** references:  a collection of management accounting notes; a useful generative AI tool./ also consider another generative AI tool.

Article review of “Management accounting and AI”: for advanced management accounting study

Article review of “Management accounting and AI”: for advanced management accounting study

 

How to present this article in Harvard reference format?

Abbas, K., 2026. Management accounting and artificial intelligence: A systematic literature review. British Accounting Review, 58, p.101551.

 

What are the key research issues the article wants to address?

The article identifies several key research issues related to the impact of digitalization and artificial intelligence (AI) on management accounting. These research issues revolve around four critical themes and cover potential gaps and questions for future investigation:

1.       Digitalization in Management Accounting

·          How digital technologies transform accounting information and organizational structures.

·          Opportunities and challenges brought by automation and digital tools in routine accounting tasks.

2.       Artificial Intelligence Technologies in Management Accounting

·          Identifying key areas for AI implementation and evaluating the business value and cost savings AI/ML can bring to management accounting.

·          Strategies for managing various types and sources of data (structured and unstructured) for AI applications.

·          Challenges in selecting, integrating, and customizing AI technologies tailored to specific accounting tasks.

·          The evolving role of collaboration between humans and AI, including trust, accountability, and augmentation in decision-making.

·          The use and impact of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) in managerial decision-making.

·          Explainable AI to enhance transparency and trust in AI systems.

·          Addressing risks such as privacy, security, confidentiality, biases, and ethical challenges related to AI use in accounting.

3.       Strategy Implementation and Control, Business Model Innovation, and Transformation of Accounting and Finance Functions

·          How AI and digitalization affect strategic management control and business model innovation within accounting and finance.

4.       Future Roles, Skills, and Competences of Controllers and Management Accountants

·          Understanding how roles and skillsets might shift, including upskilling, reskilling, or job displacement.

·          Exploring interdisciplinary collaboration and new professional boundaries in management accounting.

The article suggests numerous potential research questions under these themes, such as the measurable impact of AI, performance indicators for AI initiatives, ethical implications, trust-building in AI-human collaboration, and how organizations can effectively integrate these technologies.

 

 Describe two main theories employed in this article.

 Two main theories employed in the article are:

1.       Resource-Based View (RBV) Theory

·          This theory is used to understand how organizations can leverage digital technologies and AI as strategic resources to gain competitive advantage in management accounting. RBV emphasizes the importance of valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable resources—such as advanced information technologies and data analytics capabilities—to enhance organizational performance and decision-making in management accounting contexts .

2.       Contingency Theory

·          Contingency theory is applied to examine how the effectiveness of management accounting practices varies depending on organizational and environmental factors. It suggests that the adoption and impact of digitalization and AI technologies in management accounting are contingent upon context-specific variables like organizational size, industry, strategy, and culture. This helps in analyzing how different settings influence the integration and success of emerging technologies in accounting processes .

These theories provide foundational perspectives to analyze and interpret the transformative effects of digitalization and AI on management accounting, enabling a nuanced understanding of technology adoption and its organizational implications

 

Describe 3 main claims of the article in terms of Toulmin's model of argument.

Using Toulmin's model of argument (which includes Claim, Grounds, Warrant, Backing, Rebuttal, and Qualifier), three main claims from the article "E-controlling: Ten Challenges for Controlling and Management Accounting" can be identified as follows:

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Claim 1: Controllers have become much more important in the digital age and must adapt their tools and roles to effectively support management considering the changing business environment.

·          Grounds: The widespread use of modern information and communication technologies causes fundamental changes in business environments and value chains, increasing complexity and dynamics (page 1-2).

·          Warrant: Because environmental complexity and rapid change demand more relevant, timely, and adaptable controlling information, controllers must evolve from accounting-focused administrators to strategic risk and opportunity managers (page 2-3).

·          Backing: Evidence includes the volatile market conditions, rapid entrance barriers lowering (via the Internet), and failures of traditional intuition-based decision making (page 2).

·          Qualifier: While some traditional controlling tools remain valid, they require significant modification to remain effective.

·          Rebuttal: The article acknowledges that controlling is not completely reinvented but adapted rather than discarded.

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Claim 2: Traditional management accounting tools (like balanced scorecards, cost-benefit analysis, activity-based costing) remain relevant but must be adapted to reflect e-business conditions and new cost structures.

·          Grounds: The shift from physical assets to information-heavy value chains changes cost structures toward high overhead and fixed costs, requiring new emphases on overhead cost management and Web-site controlling (pages 4-6).

·          Warrant: Because e-business changes the sources and behaviors of costs and revenues, accounting and controlling tools must adapt to analyze these efficiently and to configure new value chains optimally.

·          Backing: Supporting observations include challenges in valuing intangible assets and know-how, importance of web-site indicators, and benefits/cost trade-offs in digital processes (pages 3-6).

·          Qualifier: These tools and approaches will gain importance and must be modified, not replaced wholesale.

·          Rebuttal: Controlling does not need total reinvention, but the article warns against neglecting adaptations.

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Claim 3: Modern information and communication technologies enable not only the redesign of value chains but also functional improvements in accounting and controlling processes, such as accelerated planning cycles, interorganizational controlling, and e-reporting.

·          Grounds: E-business complexity demands faster, flexible planning that is event-driven rather than fixed annually; collaboration in virtual networks requires controlling coordination across organizations; and IT enables rapid, decentralized data processing and reporting (pages 6-8).

·          Warrant: To cope with the speed and complexity of digital business, controlling processes must evolve functionally to be faster, more integrated, and more transparent.

·          Backing: Examples include the need for early warning systems, distributed data availability via intranet, and e-reporting systems delivering tailored real-time information (pages 6-8).

·          Qualifier: This transformation carries risks related to data security and privacy, which must be managed diligently.

·          Rebuttal: The article cautions that while IT facilitates these advances, significant security risks exist and need to be addressed.

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These claims encapsulate the article’s core arguments about the evolving role of controlling and management accounting in the context of e-business, grounded in observed changes to business dynamics, technology, and value creation.

 ** references:  a collection of management accounting notes; a useful generative AI tool./ also consider another generative AI tool.

A note on environmental balanced scorecard: for advanced management accounting study

A note on environmental balanced scorecard: for advanced management accounting study

 

Highlight 4 main ideas of environmental balanced scorecard [also called sustainability balanced scorecard] in the context of advanced management accounting study.

Four main ideas

An environmental balanced scorecard (E-BSC) adapts the traditional balanced scorecard so that environmental performance becomes part of strategic management accounting, rather than being treated as a separate compliance report. Environmental objectives and measures can be embedded in the four standard perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth.

1.    Link environmental action to financial value
The financial perspective tracks how environmental initiatives affect costs, revenues, risks, and long-term value. Typical measures include energy and material cost savings, waste-disposal costs, environmental provisions, eco-product revenue, and avoided regulatory penalties. The key accounting idea is that environmental performance can create or protect economic value—not merely add cost.

2.    Treat stakeholders as drivers of environmental performance
In the customer perspective, managers measure whether customers, investors, regulators, communities, and supply-chain partners value the organisation’s environmental conduct. Possible indicators include customer trust in green claims, environmental complaints, green-market share, supplier environmental ratings, or success of low-impact products.

3.    Measure operational environmental drivers
The internal-process perspective focuses on the activities that physically generate environmental impacts: procurement, production, logistics, waste management, and product design. Relevant measures might include carbon emissions per unit, water use, recycled-material content, waste-recycling rate, hazardous-material incidents, and compliance performance. This makes environmental management actionable at process level.

4.    Build capabilities for continual improvement
The learning-and-growth perspective measures the people, information systems, culture, and innovation needed to sustain environmental improvement. Examples include employee environmental training, staff suggestions implemented, availability of environmental-cost data, investment in cleaner technology, and development of eco-design skills. These are leading indicators: they help explain future improvements in processes, stakeholder outcomes, and financial results.

A useful way to remember the cause-and-effect logic is: capabilities and learning → cleaner processes → stakeholder value → financial and environmental value. Some organisations instead add a distinct fifth environmental or non-market perspective when environmental issues are strategically important but do not fit neatly into the four conventional perspectives.

 

Provide a straightforward accounting example to illustrate this tool.

Simple example: a small manufacturer

Suppose GreenCup Ltd makes reusable drink bottles. Management installs an energy-efficient machine costing $100,000 to reduce electricity use in production.

The environmental balanced scorecard turns this single decision into linked accounting and non-financial measures. It complements ordinary financial records by tracking the operational causes of environmental cost changes.

Perspective	Objective	Example measure and result
Financial	Reduce environmental operating costs	Annual electricity cost falls from $60,000 to $42,000: a $18,000 saving.
Customer/ stakeholder	Improve green market appeal	Sales of the “low-carbon” bottle rise by 10%, contributing additional contribution margin.
Internal process	Use energy more efficiently	Electricity per bottle declines from 2.0 kWh to 1.4 kWh.
Learning and growth	Build environmental capability	90% of production staff complete energy-efficiency training; workers submit machine-setting improvement ideas.

Accounting link

The machine purchase would normally be recorded initially as a non-current asset:

Dr       Machinery $100,000

Cr                               Cash / Payables $100,000

The E-BSC then asks management to monitor whether this asset investment actually produces the expected strategic benefits: lower electricity expense, lower emissions, better production efficiency, and potentially stronger sales. This reflects the scorecard’s cause-and-effect logic: employee capability supports better processes, which supports stakeholder value and financial outcomes.

For instance, if annual depreciation is $20,000 but annual electricity savings are only $18,000, the first-year financial result is a net $2,000 cost before considering extra contribution from increased sales or longer-term risk reduction.

 

How does the employment of this tool affect the role of the management accountant as well as the additional skill expected on the management accountant?

Change in the role

Using an environmental balanced scorecard shifts the management accountant from a financial scorekeeper toward a strategic sustainability business partner. The role is no longer confined to reporting historical costs and variances; it involves helping managers connect environmental activities—such as energy use, waste and emissions—to operational performance, stakeholder expectations, risk, and long-term financial value.

In practice, the management accountant would:

• Design environmental KPIs and link them to strategy, budgets, responsibility centres, and managers’ performance targets.
• Identify and analyse environmental costs, revenues, savings, and physical resource flows, such as electricity, water, materials, waste, and carbon emissions.
• Use tools such as activity-based costing to assign environmental overheads more accurately—for example, allocating waste-treatment cost according to the waste generated by each product line rather than treating it as a general factory overhead.
• Evaluate investment proposals for cleaner technology by considering not only purchase price and depreciation, but also energy savings, compliance costs, environmental risks, reputational effects, and expected revenues from green products.
• Communicate integrated financial and non-financial performance information to production managers, senior management, investors, and other stakeholders.

Additional skills expected

Skill area	What the management accountant needs to do
Environmental and sustainability literacy	Understand environmental impacts, carbon, energy, waste, resource efficiency, relevant regulations, and sustainability-reporting requirements.
Non-financial measurement	Combine physical measures, such as kWh, tonnes of waste, litres of water, and CO2e, with monetary measures such as costs, savings, revenues, and provisions.
Data and digital analytics	Extract, validate, analyse, and visualise data from meters, enterprise systems, production records, and potentially IoT-enabled environmental monitoring systems.
Strategic and systems thinking	Trace cause-and-effect relationships across employee capability, operations, stakeholder outcomes, environmental risks, and financial value.
Communication and collaboration	Work credibly with engineers, operations managers, environmental specialists, procurement staff, and senior executives; translate technical indicators into decisions that managers can act on.

Applied to GreenCup Ltd

For the energy-efficient machine, the management accountant does more than record the $100,000 machinery asset and annual depreciation. They would establish a KPI such as electricity cost per bottle, compare actual savings with the budget, calculate whether lower energy consumption offsets depreciation and maintenance costs, and report whether the initiative contributes to both the environmental target and the firm’s strategic financial objectives. This is the central professional change: accounting information becomes a tool for influencing future operational choices, not only recording past transactions.

** also study a video on sustainability balanced scorecard.

** references:  a collection of management accounting notes; a useful generative AI tool.