MANAGERIAL AND COST ACCOUNTING PRACTICES - A ROMANIAN OVERVIEW

Research theme - Globalization and technological changes generates complexity both in the business environment and the accounting systems. Under these conditions managerial accounting needs to learn new practices in order to become an active consultant of management. Objectives - The main objective of this paper is to present how managerial accounting changed over the years in Romania. We intend to present how the managerial accounting system is implemented within Romanian organizations, to report the level of adoption of traditional practices, tools and techniques, to identify to what extent contemporary managerial accounting practices are implemented and used, and finally to identify whether managerial accounting information is useful for business decisions. Prior works - Over the years researchers from all over the world were interested in managerial accounting changes and innovations, in managerial accounting practices, tools and techniques adopted by organizations. On international level the study made by Pavlatos and Paggios (2009) and on national level the study made by Jinga et al (2010) represents the starting point of our study. Both research team conducted a study on managerial accounting practices and the utility of managerial accounting information and found out that managerial accounting information is useful for managers in the decision making process but traditional practices, tools and techniques are used to "produce" this type of information. Design/methodology - An empirical study was conducted in 2010 within Romanian accounting professionals. A questionnaire was sent to a number of 1871 professionals members of The Body of Expert and Licensed Accountants of Romania regarding managerial accounting practices, tools and techniques adopted and implemented. Data obtained was processed and analyzed with the help of descriptive statistics. Results/findings - Romanian professionals consider that managerial accounting information is useful for management in the decision making process but these information are" produced" using traditional managerial accounting practices, tools and techniques are preferred by Romanian organizations in the detriment of modern practices like activity based-costing or target costing. Implications - The results of our study represents a reference point for both researchers and practitioners who are willing to carry on future research in the field of managerial accounting. Originality/Value - This paper tries to fill a gap in the literature related to the Romanian managerial accounting systems and practices. Moreover, it present an overview of managerial accounting practices within Romanian companies giving the possibility to formulate suggestions and proposals for its future development and evolution.managerial accounting, cost systems, practices, empirical survey, Romania

Activity-based Costing (ABC) and Activity-based Management(ABM)Implementation – Is This the Solution for Organizations to Gain Profitability?

Adherents of ABC/ABM systems claimed traditional management accounting systems generated misleading costs in a contemporary, tumultuous, often changing business environment and implementing ABC/ABM would remedy this. That is why activity-based costing (ABC) and activity-based management (ABM) represents the symbol of improved competitiveness and efficiency in every organization.The purpose of this article – after analyzing the existing literature in the field – is to emphasize that new cost systems such as ABC and ABM could be a strong couple that assures competitiveness and efficiency for each company. Another objective is to present that, besides its disadvantages, firms implement the ABC/ABM system because it permits better tracing of costs to objects, superior allocation of overheads to cost objects, financial and non-financial analysis and measures useful to managers and management accountants in the decision-making process.ABC,ABM,implementation process, profitability

Early-stage entrepreneurial aspirations in efficiency-driven economies

The aim of this article is to identify the influencing factors of early-stage entrepreneurial aspirations in efficiency-driven economies based on Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Adult Population Survey (APS) database for the year 2008. Within the entrepreneurial aspirations the innovativeness of entrepreneurial businesses and the job growth expectations were studied.early-stage entrepreneur, entrepreneurial aspirations, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor.

USING MANAGEMENT CONTROL TO ALIGN ORGANIZATIONAL STARTEGIES AND TO MEASURE PERFORMANCES

Practice shows that, in order to improve internal and external communication, managers need to increase the request of information about their business administration. So, for this, they need a complementary system which assures them this kind of informa

Palomar 5 and its tidal tails: a search for new members in the tidal stream

In this paper, we present the results of a search for members of the globular cluster Palomar 5 and its associated tidal tails. The analysis has been performed using intermediate and low-resolution spectroscopy with the AAOmega spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. Based on kinematics, line strength and photometric information, we identify 39 new red giant branch stars along ∼20° of the tails, a larger angular extent than has been previously studied. We also recover eight previously known tidal tail members. Within the cluster, we find seven new red giant and one blue horizontal branch members and confirm a further 12 known red giant members. In total, we provide velocity data for 67 stars in the cluster and the tidal tails. Using a maximum likelihood technique, we derive a radial velocity for Pal 5 of −57.4 ± 0.3 km s−1 and a velocity dispersion of 1.2 ± 0.3 km s−1. We confirm and extend the linear velocity gradient along the tails of 1.0 ± 0.1 km s−1 deg−1, with an associated intrinsic velocity dispersion of 2.1 ± 0.4 km s−1. Neither the velocity gradient nor the dispersion change in any significant way with angular distance from the cluster, although there is some indication that the gradient may be smaller at greater angular distances in the trailing tail. Our results verify the tails as kinematically cold structures and will allow further constraints to be placed on the orbit of Pal 5, ultimately permitting a greater understanding of the shape and extent of the Galaxy's dark matter halo

Land use intensification alters ecosystem multifunctionality via loss of biodiversity and changes to functional composition

Global change, especially land‐use intensification, affects human well‐being by impacting the delivery of multiple ecosystem services (multifunctionality). However, whether biodiversity loss is a major component of global change effects on multifunctionality in real‐world ecosystems, as in experimental ones, remains unclear. Therefore, we assessed biodiversity, functional composition and 14 ecosystem services on 150 agricultural grasslands differing in land‐use intensity. We also introduce five multifunctionality measures in which ecosystem services were weighted according to realistic land‐use objectives. We found that indirect land‐use effects, i.e. those mediated by biodiversity loss and by changes to functional composition, were as strong as direct effects on average. Their strength varied with land‐use objectives and regional context. Biodiversity loss explained indirect effects in a region of intermediate productivity and was most damaging when land‐use objectives favoured supporting and cultural services. In contrast, functional composition shifts, towards fast‐growing plant species, strongly increased provisioning services in more inherently unproductive grasslands

Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language

Large foundation models can exhibit unique capabilities depending on the domain of data they are trained on. While these domains are generic, they may only barely overlap. For example, visual-language models (VLMs) are trained on Internet-scale image captions, but large language models (LMs) are further trained on Internet-scale text with no images (e.g. from spreadsheets, to SAT questions). As a result, these models store different forms of commonsense knowledge across different domains. In this work, we show that this model diversity is symbiotic, and can be leveraged to build AI systems with structured Socratic dialogue -- in which new multimodal tasks are formulated as a guided language-based exchange between different pre-existing foundation models, without additional finetuning. In the context of egocentric perception, we present a case study of Socratic Models (SMs) that can provide meaningful results for complex tasks such as generating free-form answers to contextual questions about egocentric video, by formulating video Q&A as short story Q&A, i.e. summarizing the video into a short story, then answering questions about it. Additionally, SMs can generate captions for Internet images, and are competitive with state-of-the-art on zero-shot video-to-text retrieval with 42.8 R@1 on MSR-VTT 1k-A. SMs demonstrate how to compose foundation models zero-shot to capture new multimodal functionalities, without domain-specific data collection. Prototypes are available at socraticmodels.github.io.Comment: https://socraticmodels.github.io