Research Status of Accounting Reform at Home and Abroad

(1) The three stages of research and application evolution of management accounting in China from the founding of New China to the beginning of the 20th century.

1. The first stage: management accounting started to adapt to the planned economy system and the state-owned enterprise system.

During the planned economy system and state-owned enterprise system after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the theoretical research and application achievements of management accounting in China are mainly reflected in: (1) team accounting. Through the combination of team accounting and labor competition, the cost has been reduced, the labor productivity has been improved and remarkable results have been achieved. As a kind of responsibility accounting with China characteristics, team accounting unifies the three-level accounting of factory, workshop and team, and solves the problems that are difficult to solve in western responsibility accounting. (2) Analysis of economic activities. From 65438 to 0953, China began to popularize "economic activity analysis", which broke through the limitations of simple financial evaluation indicators and emphasized the use of diversified indicators to evaluate the business activities of enterprises. Practice shows that only by combining team accounting with economic activity analysis can we find and solve the fundamental problems faced by management accounting at that time. In the early 1970s, internal settlement in Daqing Oilfield was a model of successful application of economic activity analysis. "Team Accounting" and "Economic Activity Analysis" became the two magic weapons of enterprise management accounting in China at that time. (3) In the process of cost management, we emphasize "comparing, learning, catching up, helping and surpassing" and "comparing with the advanced level in the same industry". Its basic idea is the popular "benchmarking" in recent years. In addition, there are centralized and hierarchical management of capital costs, in-plant banks, etc., all of which have distinct characteristics.

2. The second stage: from the reform and opening up to the end of the 20th century, the development of management accounting has adapted to the market economy in transition.

From the reform and opening-up from 65438 to 0978 to the end of the 20th century, enterprises in China experienced such reforms as profit retention, sole responsibility for profits and losses, contract management responsibility system, shareholding system reform and modern enterprise system pilot. Accordingly, the theoretical research and practical application of management accounting began to shift its focus to the market and enterprises, demanding benefits from management, and at the same time establishing, perfecting and deepening various forms of economic responsibility system. Incorporating the in-plant economic accounting system into the economic responsibility system, a responsibility accounting system based on the internal economic responsibility system of enterprises has been formed. In the late 1980s, it matched the economic responsibility system. Many enterprises have implemented responsibility accounting and in-plant banking, but the research and application of management accounting in this period mainly focused on the inside of enterprises, lacking market perspective. After 1990s, the application of management accounting in China enterprises has made a breakthrough. The cost management system of "simulating the market and eliminating the cost" proposed by WISCO and innovated by Hangang is the most distinctive mode of successful application of management accounting in China enterprises.

3. The third stage: 265438+management accounting innovation adapted to international convergence and localization development at the beginning of the 20th century.

2 1 century, advanced management accounting methods, such as activity-based costing, cost planning, balanced scorecard, economic added value, benchmarking and just-in-time system, which are popular in western countries, have been applied in some enterprises in China, and the research on localization improvement of some methods has also been widely carried out. The research and application of management accounting in China has entered a multi-content, multi-perspective and multi-disciplinary innovation situation.

(B) Overview of the research and application of management accounting in China since the new century.

By using the method of literature research, the author systematically reviews and evaluates the domestic management accounting research since 2000 (for simplicity, there is no management accounting monograph here), and finally chooses accounting research, Accounting Monthly, Accounting Newsletter, Shanghai Accounting, Finance and Accounting (Ministry of Finance) and other accounting core journals, including Sichuan Accounting, which was closed in 2004. Because theoretical research articles and practical application articles are difficult to distinguish and have little significance, they are classified according to the main contents of the articles, and their main overview is shown in table 1.

Table 1 briefly describes the distribution of the main contents of the article. As far as the overall trend is concerned, the papers on management accounting research are increasing year by year, showing a good research trend. From the content structure, the focus of management accounting research in China from 2000 to 2006 was mainly cost management, with *** 1 15 articles (31.9%); Followed by performance evaluation (2 1.4%) and basic theory research (16.7%); Strategic management (14.4%) and budget management (15.6%) also grew rapidly, and accounted for a considerable proportion respectively. The main research situation of each part is summarized as follows:

1. Basic theoretical research

The basic theoretical research mainly focuses on the theoretical framework and elements, theoretical structure, functional design of management accounting system, management accounting environment and other issues. Among them, the theoretical framework of management accounting is the most discussed, and the main viewpoints can be roughly divided into two kinds: one is that the management accounting goal is at the highest level in the management accounting theory and method system, which determines the essence, object, hypothesis, principles and methods of management accounting; Another view is that management accounting should first solve the object problem, otherwise other problems can't be explained. When the object of management accounting is determined, we will see the interaction between it and the assumption of management accounting, and then have an impact on a series of theories such as the goal of management accounting. Judging from the main differences of basic theoretical viewpoints, solving the guiding problems of management accounting in China may be the premise of scientifically constructing its theoretical framework.

2. Cost management

The research content of cost management is quite rich, including activity-based costing, cost planning, target costing, standard costing and traditional manufacturing costing. Before 2003, it mainly focused on the normative research of single method, and there were also a few empirical studies such as questionnaire survey and case analysis. After 2004, it mainly focused on the integration of various cost management methods. The integration of cost management methods is the development trend, but there is a lack of in-depth research on the principle, cost-effectiveness and effectiveness of integration methods.

3. Performance assignment

Performance evaluation mainly focuses on the criticism of traditional performance evaluation system, economic added value, balanced scorecard and performance risk management. At present. The introduction of economic added value and balanced scorecard has changed from the initial introduction to empirical research and case study, but the real localization needs further study. Some enterprises regard these performance evaluation tools as a panacea, which may lead to serious consequences.

4. Strategic management

Kaplan regards the strategic management founded by Porter and others as the core of management accounting, and domestic related research has not fundamentally innovated the strategic management accounting system and method founded by Kaplan. This is an area that China's management accounting should vigorously study in combination with the situation of each enterprise, and it is an important lever to expand the social influence of management accounting. Strategic cost management is the focus of strategic management. In addition to the traditional "Red Sea" strategy, it is a promising new field for advantageous enterprises to explore and implement "Blue Ocean" strategic management.

5. Budget management

It is difficult for traditional single budget management to play a more effective role. Activity-based budgeting advocated by Kaplan and Cooper is the focus of budget management research in this period. Activity-based budgeting is a quantitative expression of an organization's expected activities based on activity analysis. It reflects all the work needed to achieve the strategic objectives and the corresponding demand for financial and non-financial resources, and also reflects all the improvements made to improve performance. It predicts the production and sales demand of products or services during the planning period, so as to predict the corresponding job demand. On this basis, the demand for resources is predicted and compared with the current resource supply of enterprises, so that the allocation of resources is more credible and objective. Its biggest advantage is that it can realize the most effective allocation of enterprise resources. Of course, due to the low adoption rate of activity-based costing in China enterprises, it will take time for China enterprises to really promote activity-based budget management.

Second, the main characteristics of the current research and application of management accounting in China

(A) the focus of research has shifted from foreign introduction to exploration of localized application.

After the reform and opening up, through the introduction, digestion and absorption of western management accounting theories and methods, China's management accounting can basically keep pace with the latest international management accounting theories and methods. At present, the main problem is how to apply it in enterprises.

Activity-based costing, balanced scorecard and economic added value will be effectively promoted and applied to form localized management accounting methods.

1. Research on the Application of Activity-Based Costing;

As some advanced manufacturing enterprises in China began to promote the use of activity-based costing (ABC), enterprises in railway transportation, logistics, education, media, aviation, medical care, insurance and other industries or departments also began to carry out pilot projects and gained some successful experiences. In the specific application process of enterprises, ABC also began to go beyond the single function of accurate cost calculation, and played a management role in production decision-making, enterprise pricing decision-making, internal transfer price setting, supplier selection and evaluation, customer relationship management and other aspects, and began a multi-faceted activity-based costing management practice exploration. But at present, there are several main problems in the application of activity-based costing in China: most enterprises lack the good management level required for the application of activity-based costing; Lack of information technology support; The status of ABC has not been systematically guaranteed; The relationship between activity-based costing and current manufacturing costing needs to be clarified and coordinated. These problems need to be solved by modern enterprise system construction, enterprise R&D technology innovation and national implementation of relevant formal norms and other supporting measures.

2. Research on the application of balanced scorecard;

The balanced scorecard has been widely used in some manufacturing enterprises, commercial banks, media and universities in China, and has achieved good results in the comprehensive performance evaluation of corporate finance, customers, business and learning. However, there are mainly the following problems in the application of the balanced scorecard at present: (1) The applicable enterprise type is not clear. Whether the balanced scorecard can be applied to some enterprises with incomplete value chain, cross-industry diversified group companies and trans-regional multinational companies needs to be explored. (2) Ignore the four dimensions of the balanced scorecard. On this basis, the strategic map with guiding significance for enterprise strategy has not yet been formed. (3) It is difficult to scientifically determine the weights of the four dimensions according to the characteristics of the enterprise itself. The balance relationship of BSC refers to the relative balance of different indicators, which does not mean that all indicators should have the same weight. Enterprises should design different weights for indicators according to the strategies of different development stages; In the process of development. Through weight adjustment, the overall balance of local priorities can be achieved, which better embodies the core concept of realizing enterprise strategy through BSC.

3. Applied research on economic added value:

Since 200 1, Stansted Management Consulting China Company began to promote Economic Value Added (EVA) as an enterprise performance evaluation method in China, and conducted cooperative project research with some authoritative organizations. Southern fund management company began to use EVA to evaluate listed companies and use it as a reference for investment; Dapeng Securities Company has also created a set of performance evaluation indicators called "Excellence" on the basis of EVA concept. Wuliangye company, top software development company, etc. Also began to try to use EVA indicators to measure corporate performance. EVA has been widely used in enterprise performance evaluation, investment decision-making, financial early warning and incentive mechanism, but its application has some limitations: it can only calculate the relative increase of enterprise value, but not its absolute increase; It is difficult to reasonably measure the opportunity cost of capital of enterprises: the value of EVA is influenced by the scale of enterprises; It can only reflect the financial performance of the enterprise, but not the non-financial performance. Therefore, it is necessary to improve EVA from these aspects.

(2) The research perspective has shifted from a single perspective to a multi-perspective comprehensive research.

1. Research on Management Accounting from the Perspective of Cost;

In the 1920s, with Taylor's scientific management introducing accounting, management accounting gradually separated from financial accounting and became an independent discipline. However, the current situation of its development is that theory lags behind practice, mainly because management accounting still has no complete theoretical framework that can explain, guide and apply to management accounting practice. No matter in China or in the west, the research on management accounting focuses on the method research, but not on the theoretical structure, which makes management accounting still not form a strict theoretical system. The theoretical framework of management accounting should be reconstructed from a brand-new angle-cost information. The theoretical framework of management accounting consists of four dimensions: the generation of cost information, the processing and use of cost information, the basic application of cost information and the extended application of cost information, in which the generation dimension of cost information is the logical starting point.

2. Research on management accounting from a strategic perspective:

From a strategic point of view, the traditional management accounting has three major shortcomings: the backward concept is not suitable for the development of high technology represented by computer integrated manufacturing system; Lack of strategic view of attaching importance to external environment, failing to play the early warning function of management accounting; Can not meet the needs of market competition. In today's fierce market competition, there are not only cost and financial indicators to measure competitive advantage, but also a large number of non-financial indicators. In order to meet the needs of strategic management, on the one hand, cost management accounting can be introduced into enterprise strategic management and integrated with it; On the other hand, it is more important to introduce the idea of strategic management into cost management accounting, realize the function expansion in the strategic sense, and form methods such as strategic cost analysis, product life cycle cost analysis, and balance financial and non-financial performance tables to meet the needs of strategic decision-making. On this basis, strategic management accounting has gradually formed. Strategic management accounting has the characteristics of long-term, integrity, extensibility, providing more non-financial information and flexible application methods. The basic framework of strategic management accounting includes objectives, contents and methods.

3. Research on management accounting from the perspective of performance management;

The performance management of modern enterprises should be guided by the theory of enterprise strategic management. Through the implementation of organizational purpose, expected strategy and optimization of organizational performance, employee behavior is consistent with organizational behavior, and employee performance is realized or improved, so as to maximize organizational performance. The performance management system consists of eight basic elements such as subject, object, goal, principle, index, standard, method and report of performance management, and is divided into four subsystems: performance planning, performance control, performance evaluation and incentive, and performance management information. Therefore, only on the basis of analyzing the basic elements of the system and their logical relations, and designing the running programs of four subsystems, can we design an operable running mode of enterprise performance management. Clarifying the internal logical relationship of performance management system and scientifically designing performance management operation mode are two key problems to be solved in the design of enterprise performance management operation mode.

4. Research on management accounting from the perspective of ecology;

The increasing number of eco-environmental accidents requires that the only goal of enterprise development should be sustainable development, rather than simply pursuing economic growth. Therefore, enterprises must pursue the sustainable management objectives of many stakeholders, including environment, economy and society, and create greater economic value at the expense of less impact on the ecological environment and society. In order to achieve this goal, management accounting must be improved and innovated from the perspective of ecology to meet the information needs of enterprise management decision-making after the change of enterprise management objectives. Cost accounting is an important part of management accounting. In order to meet the requirements of sustainable management objectives, management accounting should first improve cost accounting, establish ecological cost management accounting, measure and allocate environmental costs, and use relevant environmental cost information in business decisions. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional cost accounting system, it is necessary to improve and innovate the accounting methods of environmental cost management, such as confirming and measuring the external ecological environment cost, implementing life cycle cost management and environmental quality cost management.

5. Research on management accounting from a macro perspective;

Macro-accounting is a new accounting system that serves the macro-economic management. It is the infiltration and extension of accounting into the macro-economic field, and it is the trend of current accounting reform and development. There are not many research results in this field at home and abroad. Except for Social Accounting by Professor Yan Dawu and Macro Management Accounting by Professor Yu, which studied macro-accounting from the perspectives of financial accounting and management accounting respectively, most of the studies discussed the national economic accounting system from the perspective of statistics, including the internationally used National Accounts System (SNA) and the material product balance sheet system (MPS) implemented by the former Soviet Union. This structural system can better reflect the general characteristics of macro-accounting. But this is not entirely macro-accounting. From the perspective of cost management accounting, the author advocates applying its theory and method to macroeconomic management and constructing a macro cost management accounting model with cost management accounting as its basic feature. The model can flexibly select a variety of technologies, methods and procedures to adapt to the macro-economic operation in a larger space and a wider field, including macro-investment field, environmental resources field, industrial structure and productivity distribution field. ), and provide useful information for multi-angle, multi-level and multi-direction macro-decision-making of monetary and non-monetary, quantitative and qualitative, comprehensive and analytical, retrospective and forward-looking, so as to realize the macro-economic operation of accounting.

6. Research on management accounting from an empirical perspective:

In modern western management accounting research, empirical management accounting research methods have played an important role. Some management accountants, represented by Professor Kaplan and Professor Cooper, have established and improved the theories and methods of activity-based costing and activity-based management through a lot of empirical (experimental) research. Subsequently, Kaplan and Norton created a "comprehensive performance evaluation system" on the basis of a lot of empirical research and rich practical experience. These new ideas and methods have injected new vitality into the development of empirical research of modern management accounting. Many experts in our country have realized the main problems existing in the traditional management accounting research, advocated the effective development of typical case studies of management accounting, actively participated in empirical management accounting research, and achieved rich results, but they are still in the primary exploration stage on the whole. At present, there are still the following main problems in the empirical research of management accounting in China: there are many similar research methods abroad; Case studies and questionnaires are mostly used, but it is difficult to enter the enterprise for on-the-spot investigation; The questionnaire has a low recovery rate and its credibility is difficult to guarantee; Most of the research methods refer to the existing mathematical models abroad and collect domestic data for analysis. The conclusion is that their limitations are insufficient and their explanatory power is greatly affected. Therefore, how to properly transplant and learn from foreign empirical management accounting research methods and realize its localized application in China has become a new topic of empirical management accounting research in China.

(3) The research method has changed from single discipline to multi-disciplinary research.

With the development of various disciplines, the traditional single discipline research method of accounting research can no longer meet the needs of theoretical research and practical application. Advocating interdisciplinary research has become an important feature of current management accounting research. Among them, economics and management are two very important fields that need to cross.

1. Research on leapfrog economics;

(1) Transaction cost and management accounting. Transaction cost economics in the category of institutional economics can study enterprises from a more microscopic level, regard enterprises as a governance structure, and pay attention to the internal structure and control mechanism of organizations. The basic idea is to establish a systematic theory by establishing a market and hierarchy system on the same behavior assumption, emphasizing that different governance structures correspond to different resource allocation mechanisms. Transaction cost economics believes that management accounting, like other control tools, is a part of organizational control and should be included in the research topic of management control paradigm. There is a good internal consistency between transaction cost economics and management accounting, which can provide a better analytical framework for modeling in management accounting research. In transaction cost economics, enterprises can not only use external resources, but also solve problems in strategy and business decision-making by changing enterprise boundaries. At the level of strategic decision-making, some typical problems of strategic cost and strategic management accounting research. For example, value chain analysis, competitor and competitive advantage analysis, customer profitability analysis, process reengineering and optimization can all be better explained by the vertical integration theory of enterprises in transaction cost economics.

(2) Modern contract theory and management accounting. The concept of enterprise used in traditional management accounting research is mainly the concept of enterprise theory in neoclassical economics. Modern enterprise contract theory goes beyond the basic assumption that the paradigm of neoclassical economics is too strong, and puts forward some assumptions that are closer to the objective reality, such as "bounded rationality", "positive transaction cost" and "information asymmetry", thus making the theory more explanatory. Modern enterprise contract theory regards enterprises as a series of bounded rational economic agency contracts. The function of enterprise contract requires that each agent must first contribute his capital, management skills, cash, labor, technology and information to the enterprise, and then he can have the right to claim the expected income from the enterprise. Responsibility regulations confirm the form, quantity, principle of use and timeliness of resources paid and obtained by agents. This nature provides a new perspective for us to understand the internal governance mechanism of enterprise organizations and its relationship with management accounting, especially responsibility accounting. From the perspective of enterprise strategy, the resources owned by enterprises are these contracts, and its internal governance mechanism is the arrangement of various contract structures and contents in order to realize the strategic objectives of enterprises; Management accounting system is a process of concretizing the functions and responsibilities of various contracts determined by the strategic objectives of enterprises through the preparation and decomposition of budgets. Its responsibility accounting is to further decompose these functions and responsibilities into executable contracts of specific agents, form a performance mechanism, and judge the performance through performance evaluation and rewards and punishments.

(3) Speed economy and management accounting. Under the condition of traditional product economy, management accounting theory exposes more and more problems, which are mainly reflected in: ignoring the differences in the importance of various resources in the organization; Ignoring the time value of the system; Separates the dependence among the components in the value chain. Therefore, building a management accounting model that adapts to the speed economy has become a realistic need and the necessity of development. The fundamental value of speed economy lies in the finiteness and irreversibility of time, and people are willing to pay a higher price for saving time. Speed economy puts forward the following three requirements for management accounting: paying attention to the management of key resources; Emphasize the importance of time management; Reflect the holistic view. The management idea of making production plan based on restrictive links enables enterprises to achieve the goal of continuous improvement. It may be an inevitable trend to establish a management accounting model based on constraint theory to adapt to speed economy. The model should mainly emphasize three important aspects: identifying the constraints of the system, making full use of constraints and striving to improve the productivity of constrained resources, and making production plans based on constraints.

2. Research on leaping management;

(1) Value management and management accounting. In the new economic environment. Traditional value chain will be transformed into value stream and become an important research object of management accounting. With the progress of network technology and the emergence of many virtual value investment fields, it is objectively required to integrate value chain, virtual value chain and value stream to form network value stream, which is of great significance for enterprises to successfully implement strategic management. On the basis of network value stream, we should integrate enterprise network information system, network value stream system and strategic management accounting system to build the future strategic management accounting system. Its composition is more complicated than the original strategic management accounting system. It is necessary to integrate enterprise environment, information technology application, network value flow and strategic management into an integrated system.

(2) Corporate governance and management accounting. Only relying on the financial accounting system can not give full play to the role of accounting information in corporate governance, because the disclosure of financial accounting information is limited by the following factors: the scope, quantity and quality of information disclosure must follow certain accounting standards; The content of financial accounting report is mainly financial information; Restrictions on trade secrets and so on. Therefore, the amount of information carried by financial reports is limited, and stakeholders cannot get enough information from the current financial reports. The empirical research results also support this judgment. The future opportunities and risks of enterprises, financial forecast, human resources and the analysis of accounting information by management departments all belong to the category of management accounting, but the current financial reports lack effective disclosure. In this way, to provide information in line with corporate governance objectives depends to a great extent on management accounting system, and management accounting will play an increasingly important role in improving corporate governance structure and maintaining its efficient operation. Therefore, in order to realize the corporate governance function of management accounting, it is necessary to expand the existing management accounting theories and methods.

Third, the future research direction

The basic idea of the future trend is to break through the shackles of traditional management accounting, expand research fields and research objects, reform research methods, and improve the broad social impact of research. Future research trends may be promoted in the following aspects:

(A) Building a generalized management accounting system

Generalized management accounting is a new theoretical system of management accounting involving interdisciplinary, cross-level and cross-field. Structurally, it breaks through the shackles of traditional management accounting theory system, and presents an expanding development trend in the coordinates of space and time. For example, it involves several sub-fields of economy, ecology and society in space, and dynamic research of management accounting in the past, present and future in time, showing the characteristics of interdisciplinary, cross-level and cross-field. With the advent of the era of knowledge economy. The development of management accounting theory will continue to show a broad expansion trend. Faced with such a huge management accounting structure, how to explore the research framework of modern management accounting theoretical structure from a broad perspective is an important topic of current research. This research is undoubtedly of great theoretical and practical significance to the construction and development of management accounting theory.

(B) highlight the integration of research

In management accounting, single activity-based costing, cost planning (target costing), marginal flexible costing, comprehensive budget management, enterprise strategic analysis, enterprise resource planning and other management methods have their own advantages and disadvantages, so it is necessary to integrate these methods. More importantly, this integration is feasible on the basis of activity-based costing. The integration of modern management accounting system should adhere to the following main principles: relevance principle, adaptability principle, combination of responsibility and rights principle, strategy principle, flexibility principle, cost-effectiveness principle and easy to understand principle. In the specific integration methods, we can adopt colorful methods such as operation plan management, operation budget management, operation strategy management and operation flexibility management.

(C) Strengthen the combination of normative research and empirical research

With the continuous development of China's capital market and the improvement of related databases in recent years, empirical research has been paid more and more attention and has become an international standard. Although empirical research with econometrics as the main means is more intuitive and concrete than normative research in explaining and predicting management accounting practice, it also has its limitations, such as linear analysis, subjectivity of explanation and selection, data mining and so on. Therefore, under the new situation of the continuous development of management accounting and the emergence of new concepts, we must treat these two research methods objectively, so that their advantages complement each other and get an organic combination.