Development Trends of Activity-Based Costing and Activity-Based Management Software Systems

摘要

Activity-Based Costing (ABC) has been an important part of management accounting for several decades. The recent development of software systems has even strengthened this development by making it easier to calculate, assign and report cost information. However, even Activity-Based Costing seems to have a solid theoretical background several software vendors seem to highlight different aspects of it in their applications. This is due to the several reasons including different kinds of business cultures, businesses and customer needs. The theoretical part of this paper is constructive in nature. Therefore this paper constructs new reality by using research results which have in part been presented before and sees that typically the developed new utilities are sooner or later evaluated comprehensively. In the theoretical discussion, firstly, this paper discusses about the theory of the Activity-Based Costing. The purpose of this discussion is to find a theoretical background for the Activity-Based Costing and explain why it exists. Secondly, this paper discusses about the Activity-Based Management which has been developed to use the ABC information in managerial decision making. Thirdly, this paper outlines typical failures and successes in implementing ABC and ABM systems in practice. The practical part of this paper presents a comparison of the most common ABC software applications and their main features. As compared software applications seem to differ from each other, this paper outlines also the most typical trends of ABC software development in the history and for the near future. Methodologically, the practical part is a comparative case study where conclusions are made cross-sectionally using multiple cases. This kind of conclusion has been seen to provide a better formation for finding out the new innovative trends of ABC software development.