Edi Soler
Lecturer
Accounting and Control
IESE Business School Universidad de Navarra
Spain
Biography
Edi Soler has a Ph.D. in Business Administration (Accounting) from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, an Executive MBA from IESE Business School and a BSc in Industrial Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. His research and academic interests focus on product and customer profitability, pricing policies, cost systems, management control systems and earnings management. He has carried out consulting projects related to cost systems and management control systems and has also interned as a financial analyst at a number of companies in Spain. He has accumulated more than 10 years of experience in the management of educational institutions, in both Spain and the United Kingdom, and over four years in the energy supply industry, as CFO at Holaluz. Professor Soler teaches courses in financial accounting, management accounting and control systems as well as the analysis of business problems for IESE?s MBA and Executive Education programs. In addition, he has been a visiting professor at the University of Navarra and Nile University. He has also taught classes in accounting and other courses for undergraduate and executive programs in Spain and abroad. He is the author of numerous cases and technical notes dealing with financial and management accounting as well as general management and decision making.
Research Interest
Areas of Interest * Product and customer profitability * Pricing policies * Cost systems and budgeting * Management control systems * Earnings management
Publications
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When designing incentive systems, companies seek to induce employees to act in the best interest of the firm. Among other things, incentive systems tackle the following issues: (1) How can firms retain talent?; (2) How can firms motivate managers to do their best?; and (3) How can firms incentivize managers to take risks without inducing excessive risk-taking? In this technical note, we illustrate how these issues can be dealt with using monetary compensation - that is, how firms can use monetary incentives to achieve goal congruence. It shows the most common tools used to design bonus compensation schemes as well as other, non monetary incentives.
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Performance measurement is a key concept within the managerial accounting discipline. It is the process of collecting, analyzing and reporting information regarding the performance of an individual, division, department or organization. From a management perspective, performance measurement can be useful because managers could use this information to improve their understanding of the problems, opportunities and challenges faced by the different parts of the organization. Among other things, a better understanding of organizational performance could help evaluate the effectiveness of corporate strategy, optimize costs, better allocate resources across the organization or rethink the organizational design. Performance measurement can also help to set individual bonus schemes and other forms of variable compensation. When an individual bonus scheme is being designed, selecting the right performance measure is necessary to achieve goal congruence; this is to induce individuals to act in the best interest of the company as a whole.
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In this technical note we explain how to analyze deviations from a budget. We call this procedure variance analysis. The purpose of this analysis is to better understand the sources of variation between the budget and the actual performance of a company. To illustrate the methodology we use an example of a company in the textile industry. In the second part of the technical note, we explain how to conduct a variance analysis when there is a variation in the volume of finished goods inventory. Finally, we introduce other important concepts in variance analysis such as the flexible budget, absorption costing and the production volume variance.
