Contributions of engineers to the historical development of cost accounting in Germany in the 20th Century

Abstract

In Germany, the development of cost accounting during the 20th century has been advanced by economists and engineers at the same time. As far as economists and engineers cooperated in mixed committees it is difficult to separate their individual contributions. In the contrary, the contributions are exactly identifiable when they have been published at their own responsibility in a book / journal or implemented in a firm. Following these criterions in our article we describe and analyze four contributions of German engineers.

In the second half of the 20th century the “flexible Grenzplankostenrechnung” (“Standard Marginal Costing and Contribution Costing) is the outstanding contribution of engineers to the field of cost accounting. Beside this some components of the “flexible Grenzplankostenrechnung” run like a red thread through the cost

accounting contributions of the engineers. This is the reason why we look at this cost accounting system to be the most important contribution in this historical period. Nevertheless the four cost accounting systems mentioned above may be characterised as independent new designs.

Commonly the pragmatic contributions of the engineers refer to technical problems for the evaluation of their planning und steering alternatives cost information is necessary. These contributions embody indications of the design of new cost accounting systems. We combine these indications with the present state of the art and formulate in Chapter D “Conclusions for the design of new cost accounting systems”.