ABSTRACT

Information about the management accounting system (MAS) is required for high-quality decision-making in business. Thus, MAS has to be appropriately developed and organized. The paper aims to explore the role of MAS in the decisionmaking process and its changes from the perspective of the economy that shifted from transition towards market-oriented economy. The study was performed on the sample of medium-sized and large Slovenian companies. The methodology comprises an interpretation of responses to the questionnaire, which was distributed in 1995, 2001, 2006, and 2011. The analysis of the data shows changes in the role of MAS over time and indicates the characteristics of MAS during transition and post-transition periods. The role of MAS was assessed by analyzing the frequency of reporting, content, and scope of MAS information for top and middle management. The results show that in times of crisis Slovenian management did not use MAS information more frequently, as suggested by the theory. The results indicate that MAS was not that developed during the transition period in comparison to traditionally developed market economies, while during the post-transition period, especially in the period of crisis, improvements are notable. Based on the results, the authors provide some recommendations for further improvement of MAS in the analyzed companies. The study is designed to make a contribution to management accounting literature from the perspective of a transition economy.

The purpose of the article is to explore the ethical perceptions of accountants in selected Slovene organisations towards ethicallysensitive scenarios. The article explores ethical perceptions among 'internal accountants' and those working in companies operating as providers of external accounting services. Since external accounting services companies are not specifically regulated by the profession, we hypothesise that accountants working in external accounting service companies are more lenient to ethically-sensitive scenarios. Moreover, we analyse if ethical perceptions differ between accountants having a professional certificate and those that do not. We believe those that have a certificate are harsher towards ethically-sensitive scenarios. For the purpose of our analysis a questionnaire was distributed to accounting professionals. Our analysis is made on a large sample of 451 accountants. Results of ordered probit regression support the first two hypotheses, despite the fact that not all of the vignettes resulted as statistically significant. Our study contributes to the literature in that the ethics of accountants from countries with non-regulated markets of accounting services have not yet been investigated in the literature.

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The article presents an overview of the new accounting treatment of goodwill regarding International Financial Reporting Standards and American Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. Goodwill acquired through a business combination is no longer amortized but tested for impairment. Despite the fact that the objective of the new International Financial Accounting Standard has been to move towards international convergence; significant differences between standards still exist. The article presents the main changes of the regulation in the last years and the key differences between the two accounting treatments. In spite of the new accounting approach there are still lots of discussions, which indicate that the field is still not properly regulated. Finally, the article offers possible directions for future research and reporting practice.

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Studies show an increasing importance of intangible assets (hereinafter IA) and a positive relationship between IA and company performance. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the importance of IA for Croatian and Slovene hotel companies and to find out whether companies with a higher share of intangibles are also more profitable. The analysis is based on publicly available financial statements for the five-year period, from 2011 to 2015. The results show that the average share of IA presented in the balance sheets of the analysed hotel companies is low in both countries. Moreover, we could not find a statistically significant relationship between the share of IA and the selected financial performance indicators. The results of our study show that despite the emphasised importance of IA in literature, the publicly available financial data of the selected hotel companies provides very limited information on IA for external stakeholders.