Supporting Management Decisions with Ex ante Accounting Information

This paper is about the relationship between management decisions and accounting information. Management decisions have consequences in different functional areas, departments, and different companies along the value chain. Accounting information regarding decisions aims to translate as many as possible of the diverse consequences of a decision alternative into a single financial unit of measure. This makes such information both powerful and weak: various sources of information are integrated to allow trade-offs, but operational richness gets lost in the translation. The research is based on case studies and identifies situations in which managers find accounting information useful to support decision-making: (1) when they must make a significant, new or rarely taken decision, (2) when they must take new considerations into account, and (3) when operational knowledge is distributed across various people from different parts of the organization.