Accountants and financial modelling

Over the past 20 years there has been a considerable growth in the model-building activities of accountants. Grinyer (1983) argues that “accountants were already an important category [of model-builder] by 1975”, and that “by 1982 they had become a dominant one and found in financial modelling a natural extension of their own work”. Over the past decade, the substantial attention paid to financial modelling in the professional literature, with well over 100 articles in the two major journals Accountancy and Management Accounting, indicates that accountants' interest in the subject has not diminished.