Marginal cost accounting

The marginal cost accounting is a special method of the budget cost accounting . Its aim is to provide a company's short-term planning and decision-making processes with relevant cost information.

The marginal cost accounting is a further development of the flexible budget cost accounting and was theoretically designed by Wolfgang Kilger and implemented by Hans-Georg Plaut in a practical and software-supported process. In addition to the German-speaking countries, this concept has also received increasing attention in the USA for several years. In the USA, marginal cost accounting was further developed into resource consumption accounting .

principle

The marginal cost accounting belongs to the partial cost accounting systems . It is based on proportional cost and revenue functions and uses the causation principle to assign the marginal costs to the cost units. A breakdown of the fixed costs - for example through fixed cost proportionalization or with the aid of the average principle - does not take place within the marginal cost calculation.

The charging rates of the internal activity allocation in the cost center accounting as well as the calculation rates of the final cost centers in the cost unit accounting only take into account the marginal costs . The products are valued in cost unit accounting only with the marginal costs. The fixed costs are transferred en bloc or according to differentiated fixed cost groups directly to the short-term income statement .

literature

• Wolfgang Kilger , Jochen R. Pampel, Kurt Vikas: Flexible plan cost accounting and contribution margin accounting. 13th edition. Springer Gabler, Wiesbaden 2012, ISBN 978-3-8349-3238-9 .