Our results add a new flavour to the discussion of
whether the integration of financial and management
accounting relates to controllership effectiveness. We
show that a purely instrumental approach to controllers’
tasks, i.e., just taking the supply-side of producing management
accounting information into account, ignores
consistency of financial language as a driver for controllership
effectiveness from a management perspective. Thus,
even though the idea of ‘different costs for different purposes’
under a separate accounting system design has been
deemed preferable from an information theory perspective,
it does not fully meet management’s need for ‘one
version of the truth’ to be provided by the overall accounting
system.
Our findings therefore show that ‘good’ management
accounting information is not only characterized by relevance,
accuracy, timeliness or technical reliability with
respect to a given control problem, but also by consistency
from a user-side perspective. When advising management,
controllers should therefore take special care not only to
establish an understandable link between the accounting
information provided for managerial decisions and financial
accounting information, but also to emphasize this link
in communicating with management.