Innovative management accounting methods: knowledge and use in the best companies

The objectives of this study are to analyse the knowledge on the activity based costing (ABC) and the balanced scorecard (BSC) and their association with the characteristics of financial managers; and to analyse the use of these two methods. The data were collected through a survey conducted to financial managers of companies ranked as the 100 best to work for in Portugal, and the response rate was 23%. As this study's main contributions, we identified the following: the ABC's utilisation rate is higher than the one found in other types of companies; the BSC's rate of knowledge is higher than the one reported by studies already carried out in other types of companies, which also suggests the existence of internal training mechanisms that allow those in charge to update their knowledge on the most innovative management accounting methods.