Scientific essay in the field of accounting / controlling. Contribution margin in its (practical) application. Part 2 (PDF)

Scientific Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, , language: English, abstract: Cost accounting systems on a partial cost basis include those cost accounting methods in which not all costs are allocated to the activity units. The renunciation of the allocation of the entire costs is the decisive characteristic of these cost accounting systems (Haberstock, 2008).

The partial cost accounting systems can be carried out on the basis of actual costs, normal costs or planned costs. The splitting of costs into fixed and variable parts plays a central role here. Furthermore, cost accounting (especially cost center accounting) must divide and present the splits of fixed and variable cost portions in a targeted manner (Haberstock, 2008).
Cost accounting systems based on full costs have two main shortcomings in particular:

- Proportionalisation of fixed costs
- Allocation, apportionment and distribution of overhead costs

Partial costing systems were developed to avoid, among other things, these disadvantages of cost accounting methods. In general, the following tasks can be attributed to the direct costing systems: (Haberstock, 2008).

- Improvement of the performance analysis
- Improvement of the success planning
- Improving marketing decisions
- Improving cost control
- Improving the breakdown of direct (variable) costs
- Improving the breakdown of business fixed costs
- Improvement of the price calculation
- Improving the determination of the price floor (Haberstock, 2008).