The role of accounting information in revenue management

Revenue management (RM) uses differential pricing and other techniques to manage customer demand for a company's products and services. It judiciously trades off yield and spoilage, and brings rational approaches to pricing for goods and services with a limited shelf life. Because many types of businesses find that growing revenue has a disproportionate impact on operating profits, firms that know and manage their customer base often achieve better bottom-line results by growing revenue rather than by cost-cutting. Initially developed as a marketing tool for pricing airline tickets, today's numerous RM applications can benefit from accounting tools that help assess whether applications will enhance operating profit and monitor their success in doing so. Knowledge of a firm's cost structure, operating leverage in particular, and when to treat RM adjustments as special orders, are the principal accounting lynchpins. Opportunity cost variances and insights from the theory of constraints contribute to effective revenue management/profit enhancement programs. Use of proper accounting information and analytic techniques can help a tolerated union of necessity between RM programs and firm strategy become a desirable marriage of mutual choice.

The Predictive Ability of Direct Method Cash Flow Information

This research examines the predictive ability of direct method cash flow information for firms that use the direct method in their cash flow statements. We use cross sectional and pooled time series regressions to predict operating cash flow data and assess relative predictive ability. Principal findings are: (1) past period direct method cash flow data predict future operating cash flow better than indirect method cash flow data; (2) past period direct method gross operating cash flows predict future net operating cash flow better than past period net operating cash flow; (3) measurement error exists in estimates of direct method operating cash flows from other financial statement data; (4) past operating cash flows predict future operating cash flows better than earnings and accruals. Copyright Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2000.