Abstract:

Ms Excel spreadsheet plays an important role for managerial accountants and it is necessary tool for traditional responsibilities such as planning, budgeting, forecasting as well as newer decision-making responsibilities. The importance of spreadsheet is appreciated by employers, who treat spreadsheet skills as a necessary condition for new hires. That is proved by many scientific research results. In the last years such research was conducted e.g. by Ragland and Ramachandran [2014], who prepared the list of 14 Ms Excel functions and tools, a profound knowledge of how to use them is greatly desired by employers. The list encompasses such tools as pivot tables, scenario manager and solver, however it does not include a goal-seeking tool, which, according to many years of the author’s experience, is not only very user-friendly but also very useful for management accounting problem-solving.

The aim of the article is to present the use of a goal-seeking tool in management accounting education with examples from “management accounting” of management syllabi at the Faculty of Management, the UTP University of Science and Technology in Bydgoszcz, Poland.

The first part of the article provides the research results referring to the Ms Excel importance for management accounting education. Then, topics in “Management accounting” course in laboratory classes as well as educational effects in terms of knowledge, skills and social competencies are given. In the last and the most important part of the article two examples of using the goal-seeking tool are presented. The first example concerns the use of that tool in profit planning whereas the second one deals with break-even point analysis.

According to the author, the goal-seeking tool application examples demonstrated in the article explain the tool concept and how the tool can be easily adopted to the specific condition in a lot of enterprises.

Keywords:

Spreadsheet, management accounting, teaching, goal-seeking.