Accounting Skills Required by Entry-Level Management in Business Organizations in Kogi State

Over the years businessmen make some mistakes without knowing the
consequences on business. Goods may not be priced accurately and a lot of
unnecessary expenditure may be incurred on the false assumption of profits.
Needles, Anderson and Caldwell (1984) observed that to measure a business
transaction, the accountant is faced with three major problems of' recognition,
valuation and classification. The recognition problem is the difficulty of deciding
when a business transaction occurs. The valuation problem has to do with the
difficulty of assigning a value to a business transaction. The classification
problem is that of assigning all the transactions in which a business will engage
to the appropriate accounts. Agbobu (!992) suggested that accounting enables a
business to know how much it owns, owes and how much profit it has made and
its financial position at a given time. This study, therefore,.was designed to
investigate accounting skills required by entry-level managers in business
I organizations. To carry out the study, five research questions and three
hypotheses were formulated while literature was reviewed accordingly.
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Questionnaire was used to collect relevant data from a sample of 150 managers
selected from a total population of' 215 managers in business organizations in
Kogi State. Frequencies and mean were used to answer the research questions,
while t-test statistics was employed to test the null hypothesis one, and Chi-
Square (x2) was used for hypotheses two and three at the 0.05 level of
significance. The study among other things, revealed that preparing a balance
sheet, 'maintaining cost control, recognizing estimation cost, scheduling and
maintaining quality, caring for over trading were viewed as accounting skills
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required by entry-level managers. Recommendations made based on the
findings were that there should be training of entry-level managers. Training is a
means of preparing entry-level managers for the ultimate aim of making them
good so as to make them better performers in business organizations. Entrylevel
managers should be made to work. The skill of any manager is judged by
the efficiency of its work. Lastly, it was recommended that job enlargement
should be emphasized in business organizations where entry-level managers
practice.