The CIMA Strategic Scorecard™ illustrates enterprise governance in the overall governance context in which strategic decisions are taken.

The scorecard is a tool that has been developed by CIMA to help the board of any organisation to engage effectively in the strategic process. It is based on the premise that executive management is responsible for conducting the detailed strategic planning while the board needs to provide effective oversight.

The scorecard gives the board a simple but effective tool that helps it to focus attention on the most important strategic issues and to provide a constructive challenge to management by asking the right, searching questions. In context, therefore, the scorecard conveys the point that decisions are not taken in isolation. There must be accountability and/or approval for major strategic decisions. On the other hand, however, boards should not get too immersed in the detail of the organisation, and management needs to be free to take decisions that are necessary to the daily running of the business

Relating the decision-making process to the definition of management accounting, it can be said that management accountants have a significant contribution to make at each stage of this decision making process. However, the (finance and accounting) F&A function have challenges to overcome before it will be engaged to provide finance/business partnering; it must be transformed to better support decision-making

• Formulation of policy and setting of corporate objectives.  
• Formulation of strategic plans derived from corporate objectives 
• Formulation of shorter-term operational plans 
• Design of systems, recording of events and transactions and management information systems 
• Generation, communication and interpretation of financial and operating information for management and other stakeholders
• Provision of specific information and analysis on which decisions are based
• Acquisition and use of finance
• Monitoring of outcomes against plans and other benchmarks and the initiation of responsive action for performance improvement
• Derivation of performance measures and benchmarks, financial and nonfinancial, quantitative and qualitative, for monitoring and control
• Improvement of business systems and processes through risk management and internal audit review

Surveys from leading management consulting organisations suggest that the majority of top performing companies have already transformed their F&A functions. They may even be empowered by their F&A functions to achieve superior performance. However the causality is unproven. Superior returns could also be due to the holding of competitive positions in attractive sectors, choice of strategy, exceptional leadership or just good fortune. Nevertheless, the correlation is clear. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that organisations that do not transform their F&A functions to better support decision-making risk putting their company at a competitive disadvantage

Research by Accenture has shown a high correlation of over 70% between businesses with high performance and their F&A functions’ mastery of a suite of five finance capabilities

The five finance capabilities are:  

• Pervasiveness of a value-centred culture 
• Depth of enterprise performance management 
• Dfficiency of finance operations 
• Sophistication of capital stewardship 
• Extent of enterprise risk management.