Management Control Systems and the Presence of a Full-Time Accountant: An Empirical Study of Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Purpose We document the relationship between size, the presence of a full-time accountant, strategy, and the adoption of management control systems (MCSs) in small- and medium-sized Canadian manufacturing enterprises (SMEs). Methodology/approach Using survey results from 247 Canadian SMEs, we use partial least squares to holistically test our model and also present data for each MCS. Findings We find that the presence of a professional accountant is strongly associated with the adoption of MCSs and is a significant explanatory variable more often than either size or strategy. Research limitations/implications While the impact of organization and strategy has been extensively studied within large organizations, we investigate these relationships within SMEs. Additionally, we investigate the impact of having a full-time accountant, a constraint unique to SMEs due to their limited resources. Limitations include the fact that we likely have a significant survivor bias as the average age of our sample firms was 30 years. Our analysis of nonresponse bias does not allow us to conclude that such a bias did not exist. Also, it is possible that some respondents believed they had a certain MCS when others might think they did not. Practical implications This study will be of interest to owners/managers of manufacturing SMEs, their advisors, and economic development agencies. Our study also has implications for accounting education as most students will work for SMEs. Originality/value Few studies have documented the MCSs adopted by North American SMEs, and none have considered the impact of the presence of a full-time accountant.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".