New Challenges in Accounting.

Abstract Although accounting has long served business, there still remain a number of challenges to its healthy survival. These include the monumental task of accumulating and using pertinent data with respect to all scales and complexities of business activity. Such marshaling of quantitative data is not only a problem of managing the flow of information to assure its reliability but also one of timing the flow to insure its useful freshness. For one thing, the accumulation of adequate needful information is costly. This is especially true since most systems of data flow are predicated on the assumption that complete recording is necessary. This thinking generates systems involving much detail. Frequently such accounting is sufficient to swamp the group of personnel which economically can be assigned to the processing of quantitative information for use in business. Any process of balancing cost of data with the benefits derived from them necessarily involves the problem of providing quantitative data sufficiently reliable to be useful in business.