It is not, however, right that executive officers who must determine pohcies and who must make instant decisions should be forced to base all their decisions on information provided to them only in the form of the accovmtant's standard arrangement of balance sheet and operating statement.

The accountant must necessarily take a bird's-eye view of the whole business from time to time, so that he may see how all the component parts add together, to make certain that he gets a balance. The result is that the accounting officer usually makes up a periodic

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report, in which he gives at the end of any month or at the end of any year a complete bird's-eye statement of the status of the business at that particular time. Because of the nature of his problems, the executive's mind must necessarily work in a manner absolutely different from that of the mind of the accountant. The executive does not often want a bird's-eye view of his whole business at any one period of time. What the executive must have is a cross-index of the accountant's information, so that he may see over a long period of time the whole history of any portion of his business. Most managers are forced to work from the accountants' monthly statement, and their procedure is accordingly to go through the separate operating statements for several months and take off on scratch pads the figures for the items in which they may be particularly interested at the moment. These figures may have to be added together in order to compare a certain number of months this year with the same months of last year. This work not only takes the time of the highest paid man in the organization, but the hasty scratch-pad figures are likely to contain errors.