In the modern age of information technology, the sheer volume of data that is harvested has exploded exponentially with the advent of the internet and sensory technology making note of changes in their environment. Businesses collate this information and use it to their advantage to better their business, customer experiences, predict trends and identify previous errors. This information is called Big Data. The term ‘Big Data’ refers to the notion of data available to businesses which is in excess of a typical databases capacity to diverge and process due to the sheer volume and complexity. The definition of big data is dependent on the size of the business, as businesses vary in capability to break down big data. This could be due to limited resources or how the accelerating rate of incoming data being overwhelming or unmanageable for the business. In an operational sense, businesses rely on big data for different reasons due to different business environments, goals and size of entity. Big Data is sourced by businesses both internally and externally from sources such as customers, staff, machinery and the use of EPOS systems which help to process big data automatically in real time. This is one way in which firms have effectively processed big data in order to improve the business from a management perspective due to information provided by processed big data. Big data is not only limited to the usual datatypes you’d expect businesses to utilise i.e numerical data. In modern times any source of data is possible to be used to perceive the state of current operations and potential improvements. This usually comes from external sources of big data, such as, in the forms of texts, audio, social media, videos and weather data, all of which can be collated. The fact there is so much variation in datatypes and data being collected, all building at an alarming rate, makes it very hard for businesses to initially collate this data let alone being able to streamline and structure it in a data analysing system. Thus, unluckily resulting in a lot of big data to remain untouched or quite frankly useless. Therefore, in today’s competitive business environment, it is pertinent for management accountants to have systems in place which can economically deal with big data in order to boost operational performance through analytics; this is especially key for sizeable businesses who have more data and technological competition to deal with. That said, small businesses are starting to see the potential benefits from big data through the implementation of modestly priced big data analytics software which can help said businesses to collate sales and analyse consumer propensity to certain items, stock managem