Due to the wide dissatisfaction of U.S. CFOs with their organizational measurement and management, the authors purpose is to suggest incorporating practices from around the world, particularly German cost accounting. He goes on to explain the seemingly successful cost accounting practices the Germans have used for more than thirty years.

Developed by H.G. Plaut, Grenzplankostenrechnung (GPK in English) can be translated to Flexible Analytic Cost Planning and Accounting which is also sometimes referred to as flexible standard costing. This methodology has become the standard for cost accounting in Germany (p. 31). Recently, Activity-based Costing (ABC) called Prozesskostenrechnung (PK) in Germany , has also been incorporated to further sophisticate GPK.

GPK has some major differences from U.S. standard costing. Where U.S. organizations using standard costing allocate overhead with the intention of fully recovering all costs, German GPK does not. GPK is more like marginal costing with characteristics of ABC. GPK includes cost-centers with a similar level of detail as ABC activity centers. However, GPK’s cost pools have a resource-centric view (p. 32).  This system works best in companies with repetitive routines. Cost-centers need to be well defined and abundant in order to establish clear cause-and-effect relationships between resources used and their appropriate cost drivers. Defining a cost-center is a key aspect of GPK:

    Costs must be separable and specific to the output.
    Output must be repetitive.
    One responsible manager per cost-center.
    Size of the center should be manageable.
    Work must be routine.
    Cost drivers must be quantifiable and able to be planned.

The center should be classified as primary or support. (Support for a primary does work directly contributing to manufacturing or performance of a service.)

Typically, cost-centers are centered around a single “activity” with only one cost driver. This creates activity/cost-center entities within the cost accounting/management system and also in the budgeting and reporting systems. Cost-center managers can then use the previous year’s actual results to calculate the new budget taking into consideration any changes that may affect costs. ABC, in contrast, typically will have one cost-center with multiple activities (p. 32).

Another important concept is how fixed and variable costs are determined. Variable costs are defined in relation to the units of output of the cost-center activity as opposed to the total quantity of products. Variable costs are then re-allocated to primary departments according to units used.  Fixed costs are allocated based on the percentage of budgeted units of output needed per primary cost center. Then each month budgeted variable costs are adjusted to show costs of actual units produced. These actual variable costs are called target or authorized costs. Spending should be equal to the sum of target costs plus budgeted fixed costs (p. 33).

The same techniques used in cost centers are applied to production-order or work-order costing. Variance calculations are also performed on the order, and differences are passed into contribution margins for the product. These variance analyses promote more accountability and efficiency because they are more operations oriented than traditional U.S. cost-allocation systems (p. 33).

Allocation of equipment cost is different in the GPK system. U.S. systems tend to divide total equipment cost by a variable amount of activity, typically budgeted labor hours or machine hours.  Whereas, GPK equipment cost is divided by a “normalized capacity” that is the same every year. If production is less than full capacity then the “unused cost” isn’t allocated to the products (p. 34).

Another critical concept of GPK is analysis. Profitability is analyzed by groups and “layers” on profit-and-loss statements for each product, product group and the entire organization (p. 34) (See the adaptation of Table 6 below). The objective here is to provide managers with an understanding of the effective cost of operations, not for financial reporting purposes. Therefore, it is common to have the cost of depreciation based on replacement value rather than book value (p. 35).

Recently ABC has been incorporated to analyze indirect costs in order to improve cost/profitability analysis (also known as PK as mentioned earlier). Together GPK and PK are an integrated decision-support, budgeting, planning, and control system. In contrast, ABC is a top-down cost allocation system used to develop information about historical periods (p. 37).

Perhaps there are a number of reasons that GPK has been around for so long:

   Disciplined design and methodology further refined by academics,
   A clear distinction between management and financial accounting,
   Proactive use of pull logic in the design of cost-center and output relationships, and
   IT systems have evolved to support it (p. 37-38).

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