Decision-support and visualising tools for making good accounting decisions

The primary aim of our research is to develop a robust empirical model of the innovative small firm, which is useful for guiding owner-managers in their quest for high performance. The proposed model explains performance by structural variables (e.g. employment, management, directors), intellectual property (e.g. patents filed and granted), and research support (e.g. phased R&D expenditure), within the firm. Our secondary aim is to use this model to develop a new decision support tool, created using visualisation techniques, that helps owner managers, and their accounting advisors, to achieve good returns (e.g. in terms of ROCE). Once estimated, prototyped, tested, and calibrated, this tool should help management accountants to inform the owner managers of entrepreneurial firms in ways of making better decisions within their firms, thereby improving performance. We illustrate our intent with prototype models, tested on provisional ORBIS and FAME datasets, for the world and for the UK.