Management Accountant

Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Business economics - Controlling, grade: 1, University of Innsbruck, language: English, abstract: Controlling is the process of monitoring and analyzing activities for making sure that they are accomplished as planned and correcting any deviations. However, in the course of time, the area of responsibility of management accountants has changed. In the following essay we show the changing role of management accountants in recent time and in different cultures. In the first part of our paper we discuss the role of controllers and how it changed in recent time. The second part is about the four types of management accountants, which are the 'discrete' type, the 'safeguarding' type, the 'partner' and the 'omnipotent' controller, based on a field study conducted by Lambert and Sponem. With the help of a case study about problems in the daily life of controllers in a french aeronautics firm form Morales and Lambert we will show different inconveniences, which come along frewuently with the modern type of management accounting. Another question we will discuss in this essay deals with the controller's role in different cultures of several countries, where a paper by Granlund and Lukka was taken as the basis. In the last part we included some practical experiences which were gained in a practicum made by Patrick and we try to compare these experiences with the theoretical part of our essay in order to check the findings from the three afore mentioned papers our work is based upon.