Management accounting and financial management knowledge requirements for South African entry-level trainee accountants

The literature shows that the content of management accounting syllabuses does not always correspond to the subject knowledge as applied in practice. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the perceptions of TIPP and TOPP training officers differ with respect to the importance and depth of management accounting and financial management topics as contained in the prescribed SAICA syllabus. The results of this study indicate that the two types of training officers disagree significantly on the importance of 22 of the identified 31 management accounting topics. TIPP training officers place them at the lower end of the scale when it comes to importance, but TOPP training officers rank them somewhat higher. Several traditional management accounting topics are perceived as important by TIPP and TOPP training officers, which may suggest that traditional management accounting topics still have a role to play in the education of today's South African trainee accountants. The same tendency was found with regard to financial management topics. For 12 of the 15 identified financial management topics, the effect of the type of training officer was moderate, while the effect became moderate to large for the three remaining topics (treasury function topics). For both TIPP and TOPP respondents the depth in which topics should be mastered is positively correlated with their perceived attributed importance. SAICA should consider these different perceptions of TIPP and TOPP training officers in the formulation of its new training model.