Understanding Intellectual Capital Accounting
According to Roslender and Fincham (2001), intellectual capital is currently the focus of significant discussion and enquiry across the management disciplines and beyond. This reflects the recognition that intellectual capital provides a crucial source of value for the contemporary business enterprise. It is a resource that requires careful management if it is to fulfill its maximum potential.
In the case of those businesses whose shares are publicly quoted, the success with which organizations manage their intellectual capital is increasingly mirrored in their market values, values that are often many times the book values of enterprises. Bridging the gap between these two values provides one motivation for seeking to account for intellectual capital.
Another motivation for seeking to account for intellectual capital is the need to manage intellectual capital successfully. Given the importance of managing intellectual capital successfully, accounting is being challenged to develop new approaches to performance measurement that capture the quality of management evident in the context of intellectual capital.
Stewart (1997) has suggested several tools for measuring intellectual capital. Value is defined by the buyer, not the seller. A company, therefore, is worth what the stock market says: price per share x total number of shares outstanding = market value; what the company as a whole is worth. One measure of intellectual capital is the difference between its market value and its book equity. The assumption is that everything left in the market value after accounting for the fixed assets must be intangible assets. If Microsoft is worth 100 billion dollars, and its book value is 10 billion dollars, then its intellectual capital is 90 billion dollars.
Three components of intellectual capital can be identified. Human capital is the first component, consisting of the know-how, capabilities, skills and expertise of human members of an organization. Relational capital is the second component, consisting of any connection that people outside the organization have with it, together with customer loyalty, market share, the level of backorders, and so forth. Structural capital embraces the remaining component of intellectual capital, including both systems and networks, and cultures and values, together with elements of intellectual property such as patents, copyrights, trademarks, and so forth.
To begin intellectual capital accounting necessitates an acceptance that it is possible to include within the same financial statement objective measures of value, as in the case of tangible assets for which there are historical expenditures. Intangible assets such as goodwill are already problematic in accounting. For example, in the UK, only purchased goodwill can be reported in the accounts of the business that acquires it.
If goodwill continues to prove problematic for financial accounting and reporting, intellectual capital as the new goodwill serves to multiply the difficulties involved. Intellectual capital assumes many more forms than does goodwill, and while both concepts are ultimately open-ended, several years of thinking about intellectual capital have confirmed its greater breadth and depth.
One consequence of this, according to Roslender and Fincham (2001), is that we might now think in terms of degrees of intangibility, so that while brands, patents and know-how still count as intangible assets, customer data, distribution channels and employee qualification profiles are more intangible. Off the scale are such assets as employee commitment, organizational culture and corporate values, yet it is just such assets that ensure that some businesses exhibit impressive market-to-book value ratios.