Evaluation of the usage of management accounting practices in KwaZulu-Natal retail stores

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the extent at which the usage of management accounting practices (MAPs) facilitate the flow of information for internal reporting in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) retail stores. An Organization where management accounting is applied has undergone severe changes in the management and running of its operations. Earlier, many organisations that did not adapt to the changes had undergone liquidation, down-sizing and many others suffered huge irrecoverable losses. In developed countries, researchers confirmed that large number of companies have adapted to these changes brought up with new MAPs; while in contrast, developing countries such as South Africa, Malaysia, India, etc., are still vulnerable to the changes due to the excessive usage of Traditional MAPs and factors hindering the usage of MAPs. In South Africa, there is a lack of considerable studies on the usage of MAPs in the retail industry comparatively to other industries such as small and medium enterprises, manufacturing, etc. And considering the strong aspect of competition within the retail industry, the lack of studies and knowledge provision on the usefulness of MAPs to respond to competitive conditions make this study more essential, unique and a strong contribution to the MA body of knowledge literature. And also many large retail stores dominated by a massive conflict of interests tend not to be progressive strategically and not willing to adapt to the change in the MA and apply its new practices; consequently, instead of really addressing the needs of customers rather they just provide what they think customers needs at higher costs while the usage of MAPs is very essential in this regard. Therefore, this study has covered these issues and filled the gap in the MA body of knowledge by achieving the following objectives, which are: evaluate factors hindering the usage of management accounting practices in KwaZulu-Natal retail stores, evaluate and reveal the management accounting practices used in KwaZulu-Natal retail stores, determine the change effect on the practice of Management accounting in KwaZulu-Natal retail stores and reveal the benefits towards the change in MAPs thereof, and demonstrate the effect of change in the practice of management accounting in improving competitive conditions, financial performance, costs and revenues allocation and sustainable information flow in KwaZulu-Natal retail stores. The researcher administered a total of 105 questionnaires in all 21 sampled retail stores, but only 101 questionnaires were answered (i.e., calculated as 96.2% response rate). This study findings revealed that KwaZulu-Natal retail stores: are being affected by many barriers hindering the usage of MAPs, are not using contemporary management accounting practices as taught in tertiary institutions or universities, but still relying on the usage of many traditional MAPs. It was further found that KZN retail stores are not benefiting enough from the advantages played by contemporary MAPs and the MA change implications in retail stores. In addition, the path coefficient was used to determine the significant relationships existing between the latent variables developed as hypothesis in this study. The study also found that many KZN retail stores do not use proper MAPs to allocate costs or revenues to products or activities; in that same manner, this study suggested and recommended retail stores to use the Activity-based Costing (ABC) system. This study uses four theories, which are: contingency, agency, Porters’ Five competitive and stakeholder; in which the mostly applied in this study is the “the contingency theory”.