Management accounting is not new in any sense of the world. The origins of modern management accounting can be traced to the emergence of managed, hierarchical enterprises in the early nineteenth century (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987) [2]. The Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century resulted in the emergence of a factory system that dramatically changed the production process (Ashton, D., Hopper, T. and Scapens, R.W. 1991) [3]. This has created a new demand for accounting information. Market information, which had automatically provided details of materials and piecework labor costs incurred in meeting each customer’s order, was no longer available. In particular, information was required to determine the cost of the internal operations and also to measure the efficiency of converting materials leading to the finished product (Parker, 2002) [4].
Johnson and Kaplan (1987) [2] suggest that, notwithstanding the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the emergence and rapid growth of railways in the mid-nineteenth century was the major driving force in the development of management accounting systems. New measures such as cost per ton-mile, cost per passenger mile and the ratio of operating expenses to revenues were created and reported on a segmental and regional basis. Many of the innovative management accounting measures developed by railway companies were subsequently absorbed and developed by the other business sectors.
During the nineteenth century the development of so-called scientific management has made further advances in management accounting. The scientific management experts developed new cost accounting procedures to evaluate and control physical and financial efficiency of tasks and processes in complex machine-making firms and to assess the overall profitability of the enterprise (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987) [2]. At about the same time as