Accounting techniques like budgeting, sales projections and financial reporting are supposed to help prevent business failures by giving managers realistic plans to guide their actions and feedback on their progress. In other words, they are supposed to leaven entrepreneurial optimism with green-eye-shaded realism.
At least that's the theory. But when Gavin Cassar, a Wharton accounting professor, tested this idea, he found something troubling: Some accounting tools not only fail to help businesspeople, but may actually lead them astray.
In one of his recent studies, forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research, Cassar showed that budgeting didn't help a group of Australian firms accurately forecast their revenues. In a second paper, he found that the preparation of financial projections added to aspiring entrepreneurs' optimism, leading them to overestimate their subsequent levels of sales and employment.
He is not suggesting that anyone ignore accounting activities and techniques. Investors and regulators expect firms to implement robust accounting systems. And they should, he says, because financial reports provide a detailed map of a business and its performance. But Cassar believes that businesspeople - especially entrepreneurs, who bet both their reputations and personal wealth on their ventures - should understand the limitations of accounting estimates as well as how common human tendencies , like optimism, can lead to their misinterpretation.
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At least that's the theory. But when Gavin Cassar, a Wharton accounting professor, tested this idea, he found something troubling: Some accounting tools not only fail to help businesspeople, but may actually lead them astray.
In one of his recent studies, forthcoming in Contemporary Accounting Research, Cassar showed that budgeting didn't help a group of Australian firms accurately forecast their revenues. In a second paper, he found that the preparation of financial projections added to aspiring entrepreneurs' optimism, leading them to overestimate their subsequent levels of sales and employment.
He is not suggesting that anyone ignore accounting activities and techniques. Investors and regulators expect firms to implement robust accounting systems. And they should, he says, because financial reports provide a detailed map of a business and its performance. But Cassar believes that businesspeople - especially entrepreneurs, who bet both their reputations and personal wealth on their ventures - should understand the limitations of accounting estimates as well as how common human tendencies , like optimism, can lead to their misinterpretation.
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