Management Accounting in ERP Systems
I Introduction
In this competitive global economic environment, corporations all over the world have a desperate need to increase profits and decrease cost every year. They have tried many ways to improve their business, such as improving the quality of the products, gaining more market share, as well as improving customer satisfaction sentiment. These decisions though simple have several thousands of financial data points which have to be analyzed before any new decision can be made.
Inside a corporation, management accountants are responsible for these decisions with their responsibilities including “management decision making, devising planning and performance management systems, and providing expertise in financial reporting and control to assist management in the formulation and implementation of an organization’s strategy”.(Institute of Management Accountants, 2008) . With all these responsibilities many management accounts have encountered various problems, particularly in collecting the data, classifying it, and then processing it. However, new accounting information’s systems have made it possible for large scale corporations and management accountants to easily classify, collect, and standardize financial information. One of those powerful tools which has greatly helped management’s accountants fully process and gather is Enterprises Resource Planning (ERP) system.
Since 1990 ERP systems have revolutionized how companies make decisions, ERP has become an integral part in management accounting as it has efficiently helped managers to use and analyze data and apply the analysis to accomplish the company’s goal of cost reductions and increased revenue.
ERP systems have the capabilities...
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...e consumes the most resources, while conduct the least profits. Therefore, management who only have the comprehensive information is hard to make precisely and accurate decision that which product should cut the redundant cost and how to reduce the cost.
However, activity-based costing (ABC) could help to make the function of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems more integrity. Activity- based costing (ABC) not only allocate several cost drivers, but also it can track the costs incurred during the whole cycle of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to individual product and service. Combination of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and activity-based costing (ABC), corporations can have a comprehensive view of the entire company, also have an clearly sight of the details.
USPS is in need of developing the ABC, while Elkay Plumbing benefit a lot
Cost management plays a major role when maintaining profit margins. Management must be able to find in which areas of a business costs must be reduced and the consequences that such reductions have in the overall company. In some situations management must change the way the work is being done in order to decrease costs while in other cases changing one supplier for another might be enough, in both situations a tradeoff will occur and the consequences will impact the company as a whole.
Management accounting in organisation is very important for decision-making and to make the business more efficient and therefore increasing its profits. Is the process of preparing accounts that can help managers to make day-to-day and short-term decisions, by providing them with accurate and timely key financial and statistical information...
ERP stands for Enterprise Resources Planning. ERP is a term used for software that controls whole organizations different departments. SAP is the world leader in ERP systems followed by Oracle.
ERP is a huge resource managing tool used by companies today. Some systems preform general ledger, accounting and order management for the company. ERP systems are a great asset and greatly improve a company, so a company should defiantly look into implementing ERP systems! However, Gartner estimates that 75% of all ERP projects fail. Why is there so much of a high failure rate? This paper will take an in depth look at reasons to why ERP systems fail.
This, in order to identify what are the true costs of each customer and each order, enables the company to fully understand its cost structure thereby providing the base for better business choices and higher profitability. These are very sensible goals indeed. Even though the company is profitable, implementing a new, activity-based cost accounting system will allow the company to improve its margins and become even more focused and competitive in the future. 2.2. What is the difference between a.... ...
Stair, R.M., Reynolds, G.W., Gelinas, J.U. Jr., Sutton, S.G., Hunton, J.E., Albright, S.C., Winston, W.L. & Zappe, C. (2007) Accounting Information Systems and Financial Modelling, Thomson, South Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
In its current practice, the roles and functions of cost accounting includes additional functions. More specifically, it can be described as more than an inventory tracking system. This is because cost accounting entails defining the charges of activities and goods (Horngren & Srikant, 2000). Because of its many roles and functions, this accounting method has been of great help to growth and expansion of business planning and management. Again, the reports offer assistance in the planning and growth projections for different business functions and units within the organization. The information cost accountants offer different uses, some of which aid in the controllership function, as well as the industrial
An organization costing system is a system that helps the management with the strategy planning while the system plays an important role in providing accurate cost information about the products and customers (Curtin, 2006). UPS utilizes the Activity-Based Costing (ABC) system. ABC assumes that activities cause costs and that cost objects create the demand for activities (Marx, 2009). The key to cost allocation under ABC is to identify the activities that are performed to provide a particular service and then aggregate the costs of the activities (Gapenski, 2012). This is a marked departure from the practice of sharing overheads costs equally or overheads becoming part of the overall profit-loss estimate instead of component product pricing (Nayab, 2011).
Every company has some kind of Revenue and they all have costs that are associated with running the company. It is also true that if a company wants to increase their Revenue, their costs will increase too. It is every company’s goal to maximize revenue and either through Production or Services, and minimize cost. These things are easy to figure out, but actually identifying the production and figuring out how it will increase or decrease with change is very difficult.
First we will talk about activity based costing and we will start by giving the definition of it ; Activity based costing means refining the costing system by concentrating on individual activities as essential or primary cost object or tool . ABC system has a lot of benefits and we will discuss them now, ABC helps in understanding overhead much better and the percentage of prim cost and overhead is the same in both ABC and traditional system; but what gives advantage of ABC over traditional is by using ABC system it helps to know the detail of overhead so that it can identifies how is the activity to avoid.
“An Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems are software systems for business management, supporting areas such as planning, manufacturing, sales, marketing, distribution, accounting, finance, human resource management, project management, inventory management, service and maintenance, transportation, and e-business”.( Haag, Cummings, Phillips, S, M, A (2007). Mangement Information Systems. New Yory, NY: The McGraw-Hill Company Inc..)
...pplied. Cost estimation and analysis could ultimately determine major decisions in both the business and political worlds today, and play a crucial role even in our day to day lives. Through activity based costing one is able to see what areas need improvement and also whether or not a business will be successful after considering all the factors. These tools are very powerful in drawing wise conclusions from cost analysis and can be a priceless tool to have even in the field of engineering.
Making business decisions involves choosing between alternative courses of action. Many factors affect business decisions, yet analysis typically focuses on finding the alternative that offers the highest return on investment or the greatest reduction in costs. Some decisions are based on little more than an intuitive understanding of the situation because available information is too limited to allow a more systematic analysis. In other cases, intangible factors such as convenience, prestige, and environmental considerations are more important than strictly quantitative factors. In all situations, managers can reach a sounder decision if they identify the consequences of alternative choices in financial terms. This unit
Activity-based costing is used as a supplement of traditional cost accounting in a company to support manager in internal decision making. It focus on assigning the indirect cost to direct costs in order to get a more accurate cost on products. Activity-based costing uses several cost pools instead of one in traditional cost accounting. The system is easy to implement and it provides many benefits, it allows the company to respond to inefficiency by reallocating resources to more profitable activity from areas that absorb too many resources. It also allows the company to respond to manufacturing overhead cost and assumes a more accurate selling price on products in order to make more profits. Company that do not have internal expertise to conduct activity-based costing analysis may think to hire one or ask company that provides this kind of services for help.
Nowadays with the implementation of new emerging technologies, the way businesses keep this financial information has become computerised. At the moment businesses use computers with a computerised accounting system in order to perform many other new activities than what they were able to do in the past. Businesses can access financial information from different department in the organisation, access to the information through computers and find financial data very fast, being more efficient. (Beliss, 2013)