ABSTRACT : We use plain English, figures, and simple math to explain how to use path analysis to test for medication and moderation. Many theories in accounting research can be conceptualized as mediated, moderated or moderated mediation models to investigate both simple and complex hypothesized relationships. Analysis using these models captures the dependent nature of an entire set of relationships rather than attempting to make piecemeal inferences from a series of individual regressions that may not be as revealing and may even yield misleading inferences. We introduce tools that help build theory, reduce the number of inferential tests that are relied on, and is bootstrapping for inferential tests of moderated mediation that do not rely on distributional assumptions. We provide two examples from published research to illustrate and apply these concepts. Tools for analysis include PROCESS (Hayes 2020) and structural equartio modeling (SEM)