Proceedings | MIS area | Year 2015
 

Innovation Way of Understanding Accounting and Financial Data: Nature Metaphor Lotus Plants Visualization

by Voraphan Raungpaka
  
  e-case & e-tech Fall 2015 Conference in Kyoto, Japan

Abstract

Abundant information emerges from the rises of the Internet, mobility and the social network overloads entrepreneurs and small business owners in processing information for decision making. Financial and accounting data, which is considered as foundation to business, is no exception. In sophisticated business, such data become more technically complex for non-accounting background entrepreneurs and is still traditionally represented with multiple sheets containing common graphs and numbers in spreadsheet program. Such representation obstructs cognition of entrepreneurs to gain holistic insights of the business. Our research provides an alternative visualization with metaphor from mature as a learning device to understand company performance and financial position of the firms for entrepreneurs and small business owners. By surveying online survey respondents (n=133), it reveals that entrepreneurs and small business owners prefer visual and holistic view of the business to verbal and analytical. It can be concluded that the bigger the data is, the bigger picture we need.