Historic evolution of cost and management accounting (1885-2005)

Abstract

This research presents the historic events of the cost and management accounting over the last 120 years (1885-2005) following authors such as Horngren (1982), Kaplan (1984) y Johnson y Kaplan (1988). Nevertheless, this explanation does not pretend to be exhaustive and closed but it could be extended to deeper studies about another countries and periods. In summary, we can say that the management accounting has been evolved with the changes in the organizing and productive environments of the businesses. In spite of the fact that, since we have news of the existence of the mankind there have been evidences of economic calculation, one must wait until the last third of the 19th century to find regular assignments of the indirect cost to the products and the utilization of indicators for management purposes. Likewise, it has been seen that during the first years of the 20th century there was a period of significant evolution in the management accounting as the result of the apparition of the Movement of the Scientific Direction of the Work by Taylor. The first quarter of the 20th century also supposed an evolution in the management accounting as the result of the creation of multinational businesses. That meant the apparition of new indicators for the assignment of resources. Nevertheless, according to Johnson y Kaplan (1988), from the third decade of the 20th century to the eighties, there has not been a significant evolution due, above all, to the importance given to the financial statements. Nevertheless, Horngren (1982) does not see the period uniformly and identifies three phases in this evolution. A point of inflection has been the organizing and technological changes occurred during the eighties. These have supposed that during the last decade of the 20th century and the first years of the 21st one the management accounting has recovered a new vigour in the research and in the practice. In any case, the lineal presentation of the evidences used here does not mean to be unique. In fact, the diversity of approaches to the historic facts, have supposed the re-emerge of the research in the last decade. In any case, we coincided with Hernández (1996) in the sense that the historic investigation should be supported in primary sources.