Managerial Accounting For Dummies

Chapter 22

Ten Legends of Managerial Accounting

In This Chapter

Watching the whistleblowers

Creating new ways to do managerial accounting

Regulating accounting and management to better serve stakeholders

Believe it or not, managerial accountants have a number of legends to admire. A few people have made great contributions to the profession and to business as a whole through ingenuity, persistence, and a willingness to stand up for the principles that they believe in. I’m talking creative individuals who found new and better ways to solve old problems, famous whistleblowers who reported financial wrongdoings, and congressmen who led the U.S. federal government’s move to regulate the accounting profession.

Dan Bricklin

Few people have changed the lives of all kinds of accountants more than Dan Bricklin, who had the idea for the first electronic spreadsheet program. While a student at Harvard Business School, he noticed that the new Apple II computer could be programmed to simplify many accounting and finance calculations. With Bob Frankston, Bricklin wrote the very first spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, for the Apple II computer.

Interestingly, even though VisiCalc led to the creation ...