Planning and Management Accounting in Austria – Lessons Learned and d...

In the last few decades, planning and managerial accounting (management control) have developed significantly in Austria. These issues have been investigated empirically in various areas according to their stages of development in Austria, but often with changing topics or specific emphases.

The year 2008 came as a surprise to many companies and the situation in the following years was challenging. Negative developments on the capital markets had reached the real economy and many areas had changed to an extent that had generally not been expected and that many enterprises had not been prepared for. Reduced working hours, bankruptcies, closures, injections of capital, and investments by the public sector were predominant topics. Much less was heard about the companies that used these conditions to invest in their success factors or in other enterprises, to acquire markets, technologies and know-how, or to reposition themselves.

This paper provides a first descriptive summary of the development of planning and management control and its emancipation as a business function in Austria over the past 30 years, based upon a research program started in 1984. Furthermore this paper will focus on the future development of planning and management control in Austria. The survey was carried out by means of a standardized written questionnaire in the years 1984 to 2007 and by means of a standardized online questionnaire in 2013 (starting end 2012). The questions were asked repeated unmodified according to a longitudinal-section comparison and supplemented by additional specific questions. The results presented in this paper provide a descriptive analysis and focus on the aspects of the longitudinal-section comparison.