1、 1 1845 单词， 2940 汉字 ,10860 英文字符 出处： Wendisch N, Heupel T. Implementing environmental cost accounting in small and medium-sized companiesM/Implementing Environmental Management Accounting: Status and Challenges. Springer Netherlands, 2005: 193-205. IMPLEMENTING ENVIRONMENTAL COST ACCOUNTING IN SMALL
2、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 separated from the core accounting system based an assessment of environmental costs with
3、(see Fichter et al., 1997, Letmathe and Wagner , 2002). As environmental costs are commonly assessed as overhead costs, neither the older concepts of full costs accounting nor the relatively recent one of direct costing appear to represent an appropriate basis for the implementation of ECA. Similar
4、to developments in conventional accounting, the theoretical and conceptual sphere of ECA has focused on process-based accounting since the 1990s (see Hallay and Pfriem, 1992, Fischer and Blasius, 1995, BMU/UBA, 1996, Heller et al., 1995, Letmathe, 1998, Spengler and H.hre, 1998). Taking available co
5、ncepts of ECA into consideration, process-based concepts seem the best option regarding the establishment of ECA (see Heupel and Wendisch , 2002). These concepts, however, have to be continuously revised to ensure that they work well when applied in small and medium-sized companies. Based on the fra
6、mework for Environmental Management Accounting presented in Burritt et al. (2002), our concept of ECA focuses on two main groups of environmentally related impacts. These are environmentally induced financial effects and company-related effects on environmental systems (see Burritt and Schaltegger,
7、2000, p.58). Each of these impacts relate to specific categories of financial and environmental information. The environmentally induced financial effects are represented by monetary environmental information and the effects on environmental systems are represented by physical environmental informat
8、ion. Conventional accounting deals with both monetary as well as physical units but does not focus on environmental impact as such. To arrive at a practical solution to the implementation of ECA in a companys existing accounting system, and to comply with the problem of 2 distinguishing between mone
9、tary 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 syste
10、m database is essential. From there, the generation of physical environmental and monetary (environmental) information would in many cases be feasible. For many companies, the priority would be monetary (environmental) information for use in for instance decisions regarding resource consumptions and
11、 investments. The use of ECA in small and medium-sized enterprises (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 (see Kosmider, 1993 and Reinemann, 1999). In our work the c
12、riteria shown in Table 1 are used to describe small and medium-sized enterprises. Table 1. Criteria of small and medium-sized enterprises Number of employees Turnover Up to 500 employees Turnover up to EUR 50m Management Organization - Owner-cum-entrepreneur -Divisional organization is rare - Varies
13、 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 - Top-down planning in old companies direct personal contact - Delegation is rare - Low level of formality - High
14、flexibility Finance Personnel - family company -easy to survey number of employees - limited possibilities of financing -wide expertise -high satisfaction of employees Supply chain Innovation -closely involved in local -high potential of innovation 3 economic cycles in special fields - intense relat
15、ionship with customers and suppliers Keeping these characteristics in mind, the chosen 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 Enterpr
16、ise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like SAP R/3, Oracle and Peoplesoft. ERP systems support business processes across organizational, temporal and geographical boundaries using one integrated database. The primary use of ERP systems is for planning and controlling production and administration proc
17、esses of an enterprise. 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) because the
18、se solutions work with the database of more comprehensive software solutions like SAP, Oracle, Navision or others. Umberto software for example (see Umberto, 2003) would require large investments and great background knowledge of ECA which is not available in most SMEs. The ECA approach suggested in
19、 this chapter is based on an integrative solution meaning that an individually developed database is used, 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 co
20、mpanies to individually obtain the relevant cost information. The aim of the research was thus to find out what cost information is relevant for the companys decision on environmental issues and how to obtain it. 2 METHOD FOR IMPLEMENTING ECA Setting up an ECA system requires a systematic procedure.
21、 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 available. Depending on the stage of
