The Impact of Data Visualization in Management Accounting Reports on Managers Decision-making

Managers are confronted with increasing information overload and growing pressure for effective and efficient decision making. The visualisation of data represents a way to overcome this dilemma and to improve management decision quality. The purpose of this paper is to transfer insights from visualisation research to the managerial accounting context and clarify the impact of visualisation on management accounting reports and decision making. In order to answer the research question, three hypotheses are tackled. Study sample includes experienced managers and accounting students. The empirical results show that supplementary graphs improve decision quality, especially within the manager sample but do not affect decision confidence in a performance evaluation task. Based on results, managers perform poorly when only provided with tables, and they achieve the overall best score when provided with both tables and graphs. Furthermore, the findings showed that managers were more confident in their decisions than students, irrespective of the information presentation