Cost accounting in ERP systems

In practice, I often notice that the difference between cost accounting and financial accounting – in particular the different tasks of the two systems – are not perceived correctly. Therefore, I would like to address this briefly in our blog in a separate article.

A modern ERP system contributes all the information necessary for managing a company. At the same time, it makes the important data available to all employees in a company for their daily work.

A crucial sub-task of ERP systems is cost accounting as cost and performance accounting as a meaningful addition to financial accounting.

While financial accounting highlights information for the overall economic situation of a business and illustrates profit and loss, cost accounting details the costs of products and services, as all direct costs (cost of sales as external costs, and time costs as personnel costs) can be included in the evaluation. As part of the full-cost accounting, the overheads that cannot be assigned directly are allocated to the individual cost units.

With this, in contrast to financial accounting, up-to-date and detailed statements can be made about costs and revenues through to contribution margin II of services and products.

As all receipts in the ERP system are captured automatically in a pre-assigned manner, these can be transferred directly to financial accounting without additional effort via interfaces.