This essay will discuss Balance Scorecard (BSC) can help organisations achieve better results when compared to traditional performance measurement system. It will cover three aspects- One aspect is the weakness of traditional tool; another aspect is that give evidence to show that BSC are more suitable to measure performance. Finally, BSC also has some limitation and need to improvement.
Since 1980s, some researchers have tried to find some other tools which are not relevant of traditional control for company implementing operational strategies. The reason is that traditional system was not sufficient and failure to link performance measurement in the new economic. Meantime, the traditional financial control alone was only focusing on accounting for external reporting, but was missing the factors which are useful for internal decision making such as competence and knowledge, competitors and operational efficiency. To illustrate, by considering financial alone is not sufficient in the service industry, because mangers must more emphasis on training staff rather than financial performance, then can ensure their employees have good relationship with customers.
Atkinson (1997) states that the BSC is significant tool to develop management accounting to compared with the traditional measures. The mean benefit is that BSC simply sets out the four perspectives (graph 1) for developing a coherent set of objectives for business and helps to translate strategy into operational terms. (Kaplan and Norton1996) The four perspectives also have balanced between long term and short term and also balanced the performance measurement which is financial plus consumer and employee satisfaction dimensions, as well as communicate with internal and external stakeholders which ...