IMPLEMENTING ENVIRONMENTAL COST
ACCOUNTING IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED
COMPANIES
1．ENVIRONMENTAL COST ACCOUNTING IN SMES
Since its inception some 30 years ago, Environmental Cost Accounting (ECA) has reached a stage of development where individual ECA systems are parated from the core accounting system bad an asssment of environmental costs with (e Fichter et al., 1997, Letmathe and Wagner , 2002).
As environmental costs are commonly assd as overhead costs, neither the older concepts of full costs accounting nor the relatively recent one of direct costing appear to reprent an appropriate basis for the implementation of ECA. Similar to developments in conventional accounting, the theoretical and conceptual sphere of ECA has focud on process-bad accounting since the 1990s (e Hallay and Pfriem, 1992, Fischer and Blasi
us, 1995, BMU/UBA, 1996, Heller et al., 1995, Letmathe, 1998, Spengler and H.hre, 1998).
Taking available concepts of ECA into consideration, process-bad concepts em the best option regarding the establishment of ECA (e Heupel and Wendisch , 2002). The concepts, however, have to be continuously revid to ensure that they work well when applied in small and medium-sized companies.
Bad on the framework for Environmental Management Accounting prented in Burritt et al. (2002), our concept of ECA focus on two main groups of environmentally related impacts. The are environmentally induced financial effects and company-related effects on environmental systems (e Burritt and Schaltegger, 2000, p.58). Each of the impacts relate to specific categories of financial and environmental information. The environmentally induced financial effects are reprented by monetary environmental information and the effects on environmental systems are reprented by physical environmental information. Conventional accounting deals with both – monetary as well a
s physical units – but does not focus on environmental impact as such. To arrive at a practical solution to the implementation of ECA in a company’s existing accounting system, and to comply with the problem of distinguishing between monetary and physical aspects, an integrated concept is required. As physical information is often the basis for the monetary information (e.g. kilograms of a raw material are the basis for the monetary valuation of raw material consumption), the integration of this information into the accounting system databa is esntial. From there, the generation of physical environmental and monetary (environmental) information would in many cas be feasible. For many companies, the priority would be monetary (environmental) information for u in for instance decisions regarding resource consumptions and investments. The u of ECA in small and medium-sized enterpris (SME) is still relatively rare, so practical examples available in the literature are few and far between. One problem is that the definitions of SMEs vary between countries (e Kosmider, 1993 and Reinemann, 1999). In our work the criteria shown in Table 1 are ud to describe small and medium-sized enterpris.
Table 1. Criteria of small and medium-sized enterpris
Number of employees Turnover
Up to 500employees Turnover up to EUR 50m 抗疫标题
Management Organization
- Owner-cum-entrepreneur -Divisional organization is rare
- Varies from a patriarchal management -Short flow of information style
in traditional companies and teamwork -Strong personal commitment
in start-up companies -Instruction and controlling with寿书法
- Top-down planning in old companies direct personal contact
- Delegation is rare
- Low level of formality
- High flexibility
Finance Personnel
鲧禹治水- family company -easy to survey number of employees
- limited possibilities of financing -wide experti
-high satisfaction of employees
石桥拼音
Supply chain Innovation
-cloly involved in local -high potential of innovation
少小无猜九色鹿故事
蒸汽波壁纸 economic cycles in special fields
企业税务筹划- inten relationship with customers
and suppliers
Keeping the characteristics in mind, the chon ECA approach should be easy to apply, should facilitate the handling of complex structures and at the same time be suited to the special needs of SMEs.
Despite their size SMEs are increasingly implementing Enterpri Resource Planning (ERP) systems like SAP R/3, Oracle and Peoplesoft. ERP systems support business process across organizational, temporal and geographical boundaries using one integrated databa. The primary u of ERP systems is for planning and controlling production and administration process of an enterpri. In SMEs however, they are often individually designed and thus not standardized making the integration of for instance software that supports ECA implementation problematic. Examples could be tools like the “eco-efficiency” approach of IMU (2003) or Umberto (2003) becau the solutions work with the databa of more comprehensive software solutions like SAP, Oracle, Navision or others. Umberto software for example (e Umberto, 2003) would require large investments and great background knowledge of ECA – which is not available in most SMEs.
The ECA approach suggested in this chapter is bad on an integrative solution – meaning that an individually developed databa is ud, and the ECA solution adopted draws on the existing cost accounting procedures in the company. In contrast to other ECA approaches, the aim was to create an accounting system that enables the companies to individually obtain the relevant cost information. The aim of the rearch was thus to find out what cost information is relevant for the company’s decision on environmental issues and how to obtain it.
2．METHOD FOR IMPLEMENTING ECA
Setting up an ECA system requires a systematic procedure. The project thus developed a method for implementing ECA in the companies that participated in the project; this is shown in Figure 1. During the implementation of the project it proved convenient to form a core team assigned with corresponding tasks drawing on employees in various departments. Such a team should consist of one or two persons from the production department as well as two from accounting and corporate environmental issues, if availab
le. Depending on the stage of the project and kind of inquiry being considered, additional corporate members may be added to the project team to respond to issues such as IT, logistics, warehousing etc.
