Traditional Vs. Contemporary Management Accounting Practices and its Role and Usage across Business Life Cycle Stages: Evidence from Pakistani Financial Sector

Abstract

The research examines the management accounting practices and its level of usage in services sector of Pakistan. For this purpose, banking companies, Insurance companies, Telecommunication companies and Computer Service companies were selected. The data was collected through adapted questionnaire regarding management accounting practices and its level of usage. There were 90 target listed services companies from service industry where data has been collected. The unit of analysis was company and the responses were analyzed through descriptive statistics. Findings with regard life cycle stages, there are 69% respondents companies belong from growth stage and 24.4% are located in maturity stage. The results indicate that management accounting practices for instance costing practices; budgeting practices & decision making practices are widely used especially traditional management accounting practices in service sector of Pakistan. While in terms of performance evaluation practices, all the non financial measures related to employees, customers and operation or innovation have lower level of usage in service sector of Pakistan irrespective of the business life cycle stage. Moreover, the results reveal that financial companies which are sub sector of service sector are more sophisticated by utilizing management accounting practices but other services companies do not much utilize management accounting practices from financial sector of Pakistan. These results imply that management accounting practices are more complicated as the companies move from growth to maturity stage. In addition, traditional management accounting practices still have the highest level in financial sector of Pakistan based on its importance & usage.