A fuzzy set approach to client acceptance decisions

Client acceptance policies and procedures are important elements of a public accounting firm´s quality control system. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the use of fuzzy sets and fuzzy numbers as a means of enhancing and refining the authoritative client acceptance guidelines. The paper illustrates how fuzzy sets can be used to capture the beliefs of one or several partners assessing the factors involved in the client acceptance decision, and then to build a fuzzy model that combines these assessments to determine whether a client should be accepted. The fuzzy models can be used as an alternative to or in combination with traditional decision-making approaches