define problem solving in accounting

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Show Your Logic

Avoid conflict and build trust by establishing the “why” behind decisions and sharing it with colleagues.

Asking Questions, Unlocking Solutions

How reframing a problem creates value for customers

The Future of Fast Food

Alumni dish on the industry's digital transformation.

On a meteoric rise through the fiercely competitive luxury retail market, high-end handbag brand Anima Iris has been picked up by Nordstrom, Saks Fifth Avenue, and even Beyoncé. With geometric and bold designs, founder Wilglory Tanjong G22 WG22 expresses her ancestry in a fashionable and sustainable way. The bags are made in Senegal by expert craftspeople who have honed their techniques over decades and draw inspiration from centuries of heritage. The leather and other materials are sourced through local African business merchants. Anima Iris is environmentally friendly and employs a zero-waste model that ensures all materials are used and that no two products are the same.

Bilt Rewards

Bilt Rewards launched in 2021 and achieved immediate success in its first year. The startup credit-card rewards program by founder and CEO Ankur Jain W11 makes redeeming points from purchases easy with a unique twist — the card can be used toward rent payments. Jain explains that renters today are living with inflation and rising rent costs, resulting in many who now must pay close to 50 percent of their earned income on rent. Bilt helps this generation build credit while earning rewards that open up affordability in other areas of their lives, such as travel experiences and eventual home ownership.

An organic coconut butter with its early roots in Venture Lab’s Food Innovation Lab can now be found in 1,300 stores, including national chains Sprouts and Wegmans. Couple-turned-business-partners Breanna Golestani WG23 and Jared Golestani WG23 founded Kokada in 2020 to provide a healthier alternative to sugar-laden snacks and spreads typically found at the grocery store. Kokada offers a range of coconut butters that are all peanut-free and sugar-free and designed to be enjoyed as a dip, with a treat, or as part of a meal. The company gives back two percent of all sales to SERVE, a certified NGO based in Sri Lanka, where its ingredients are sourced.

Flagler Health

Developed by Albert Katz WG23 and Will Hu GED19, Flagler Health combines patient data and the power of AI to help physicians recommend treatments to their patients. (“It’s like giving a calculator to a mathematician,” says Katz.) Backed by $6 million in funding, Flagler Health now serves more than 1.5 million patients and recently launched a new product that provides remote patients with exercises to keep joints moving pre- and post-op. The startup made the Poets & Quants “Most Disruptive MBA Startups of 2023” list and was a finalist in Penn’s 2023 Venture Lab Startup Challenge.

Catching Eyes in the Attention Economy

New research shows how to use language to capture audience attention, from word choice to building suspense.

Juggling multiple vendors can be daunting for a small-business owner. Certa, led by CEO Jagmeet Lamba WG07 and CFO Dudley Brundige WG07, streamlines relationships with third-party vendors, making onboarding up to three times faster. The platform itself can reduce IT labor needs, allowing users to create personalized workflows. The company also has its own AI technology — CertaAssist — that can fill out supplier questionnaires, consolidate intake requests, and create data visualizations. Certa’s clients include Uber, Instacart, and Box, whose executives have reported reduced cycle times and operating costs after using the procurement software.

United for a Brighter Future

Dean Erika James reflects on opportunities for the Wharton community to come together and lead.

On the Scene

From Hong Kong to New York, Wharton alumni unite for Impact Tour gatherings, GOLD events, good music, and more.

Sigo Seguros

Spanish remains the most widely used language in the U.S. behind English, with an estimated 41 million current speakers. But Hispanic immigrants still face cultural barriers when they arrive in the States. Nestor Hugo Solari G19 WG19 and Júlio Erdos C10 ENG10 G19 WG19 created Sigo Seguros, a bilingual Texas-based car insurance technology company, to better serve this population. “Our differentiated product starts with a deep understanding of our community and its needs,” says Solari. The Spanish-language mobile and web portals, coupled with quick payback periods, are particularly appealing to working-class drivers. The “insurtech” company raised $5.1 million in additional pre-seed funding in 2023.

Supercharge Your Startup

Resources to help you jump-start your venture’s growth

Cancer can bring your life to a screeching halt. Along with the burden of navigating through new medical terminology and uncertainty, a positive diagnosis can generate feelings of loneliness and isolation. CancerIQ was founded by Feyi Olopade Ayodele W05 WG12 to offer a supportive and more strategic solution for health-care providers working with patients in early cancer detection and prevention. As a software platform, CancerIQ offers hyper-personalized care plans and assesses risks in patients by avoiding the one-size-fits-all approach. The tool focuses on early detection with more precise screening. CancerIQ has been implemented in more than 200 clinic locations across the U.S.

Every day seems to bring a new way to send, receive, or manage money. Managing cash flow on numerous platforms has become quite onerous, non? Au contraire . Piere, an AI-powered app founded by Yuval Shmul Shuminer W19, analyzes past transactions to create a customized budget in two taps. It’s a peer-to-peer facilitator (for such tasks as getting reimbursed for a group meal) and a spending tracker in one. Since Intuit shut down its popular Mint budgeting app, Piere is reported to be the ideal successor: News outlets have featured the app as part of the “loud budgeting” social media trend, and financial publications highlight it as a valuable tool for monitoring spending.

Heidi Block WG95 and her family first got hooked on pickleball during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when they played the sport together at home in New Jersey to pass the time and stay active. But when Block couldn’t find apparel specifically designed for pickleball, she decided to make her own. Along with her eldest son, Max, she founded Play-PKL, an online retailer selling premium pickleball equipment and stylish outfits for recreational players. The site also offers tips and lessons for beginning pickleballers.

The Eight Fundamentals of Problem Solving

As business leaders we are consequently required to solve problems. But what are the very fundamentals of problem solving?

Read on to find out.

1. Define the Real Problem

This is the biggie. Ensure that you are solving the right problem. Toyota is justifiably famous for its problem-solving savvy in perfecting its production methods. According to Toyota, the key to their method is to spend relatively more time defining the problem and relatively less time on figuring out the solution.

2. Solve the Root Cause of the Problem

Don’t treat the symptoms; solve the root cause of the problem. There are numerous methods to determine root causes—cause mapping, fishbone diagrams, etc. For me, the easiest and most effective is to use the “Five Whys.” Ask a question and to each answer ask. “Why?” again. Doing this for five times should get you to the root cause of the problem.

3. Use a Hypothesis

As happens on the “CSI” television shows, you should make a best guess as to the solution to the problem at the very beginning of your process—define the initial hypothesis. Then test this initial hypothesis by digging deep to determine whether the hypothesis is right or wrong and adjusting the hypothesis as the facts dictate.

4. Get the Facts

Dig deep and get the facts to truly understand the nature of the problem and the possible solutions. Do the analysis to let the facts do the talking instead of gut instinct. As Wharton’s own Peter Cappelli says: “I tell my MBA students that whenever you are going with your gut, you are doing something wrong. In most cases, you can actually figure it out. So you should sit down and figure it out.”

5. Keep the solution simple

Any solution to a problem has to be implemented by your team. So keep it simple. Be able to explain the solution clearly and precisely in 30 seconds. Limit the action items to solve the problem to three. Go for the solution that solves 80 percent of the problem but that is 100 percent implementable by the team—rather than a 100 percent solution that is unlikely to ever be properly implemented.

6. Do not re-invent the wheel

Plagiarism can be good. If someone has a clever idea or way to solve your problem, by all means legally use it. The “not invented here” syndrome is just sheer arrogance.

7. Gain momentum in problem solving

In situations where you have multiple problems to solve (e.g., business turnarounds) pluck the low-hanging but important fruit first. Solve the easy problems. This gives you momentum, shows progress and gives your team confidence.

8. Consider time

With any solution, ensure that you do first what needs to be done first. Also, ensure that the solution can be implemented in a reasonable period of time. Solutions that take longer than a few months will likely fail. The momentum will die out or top management will move on to another “critical issue.”

Everyday Advice for Business Leader Sanity

Simple to-do tips that are easy to execute in a how-to world drowning in advice.

7 Ways Your Smartphone May Be Killing Your Business

Today’s smartphones enable business leaders to constantly be in contact with the office and access the Internet or the cloud for needed information on the fly. Unfortunately, it is exactly this constant contact and easy access that often overwhelm the positives and make these devices harmful to the leaders’ businesses and lives.

9 Keys to Driving Cultural Change

The hardest part of a business transformation is changing the culture—the mindset and instincts of the people in the company. So, what are the keys to driving cultural change?

The Inside Story of How Creative Business Gets Done

Leadership consultant Roz Courtney translates the story behind an iconic Robin Williams cover photo to lessons in creativity valuable to any business executive.

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Critical thinking and problem solving

Critical thinking 

Critical thinking is a scope of various complex skills related to a higher level of thinking. It is a self-directed thinking that produces new and innovative ideas and solves problems. It assumes reflecting critically on learning experiences and processes, and making effective decisions by avoiding common pitfalls, for example seeing only one side of an issue, discounting new evidence that disconfirms your ideas, reasoning from passion rather than logic, and failing to support statements with evidence.

In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness.

Problem Solving

Problem Solving is a mental process involving the ability to analyze and find the solution that best resolves the problem. It describes the process where there is a goal that is blocked for any reason – lack of resources, lack of information and so on – that presents a problem. Whatever is done in order to achieve the set goal is problem solving. 

There are routine problems and non-routine problems. Routine problems can be solved using methods familiar to students by replicating previously learned methods in a step-by-step fashion. Non-routine problems are problems for ‘which there is not a predictable, well-rehearsed approach or pathway explicitly suggested by the task, task instructions or a worked-out example’. Everyone needs problem solving skill in everyday life. It assumes a group of skills which, in addition to cognitive, includes social and other skills, helping us to define causes to the problem and to find efficient solutions. We use critical and creative thinking in order to solve problems. 

Benefits of learning critical thinking and problem solving skills

Benefits of learning critical thinking.

• Critical thinking improves students’ flexibility and learning skills. We don’t know how technology will change by the time young people leave education. Learning critical thinking and problem solving will prepare them to learn and adapt faster and keep up to date with relevant changes in their fields of study, whatever they may be
• Critical thinking makes education less passive and more interactive. Teaching students how to approach critically any subject makes it more relevant for them. It helps them better understand and get more involved with the subject and its importance in their lives, making them feel as they are active participants
• Critical thinking and problem solving skills enhances academic performance. Rather than relying on teachers and classroom time for instruction and guidance, students with critical thinking skills become more independent, self-directed learners
• Critical thinking is the foundation of science and a liberal democratic society. Science requires the critical use of reason in experimentation and theory confirmation. The proper functioning of a liberal democracy requires citizens who can think critically about social issues to inform their judgments about proper governance and to overcome biases and prejudice.

Benefits of learning problem solving

• Students gain the ability to reflect critically on learning experiences and processes and to make effective decisions
• While solving problems, students also learn other important skills such as creativity, collaboration and cooperation
• Critical thinking enables separation of facts from opinions and helps consider all possible options in solving a problem
• Students are getting prepared for jobs that don’t exist yet. The work environment is changing fast and we simply do not know what jobs will exist and even less so what will be required to do them. Workers will be  likely selected based on their ability to learn fast, adapt to changes and work independently, make job-related decisions independently and be able to solve problems on their own.

Problems and Solutions

A comprehensive set of problems along with solution for accounting, finance and cost accounting.

Principles of Accounting Problems & Solutions

Principles of Accounting Problems & Solution is a set of important questions and answers.

Financial Accounting Problems & Solutions

Financial Accounting Problems & Solutions is a set of problems along with solutions are given.

Cost Accounting Problems & Solutions

Cost Accounting Problems & Solutions is a set of question and solution for cost accounting students.

Finance Problems & Solutions

Finance Problems & Solutions is set of question with solutions for business finance students.

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