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1、成本会计外文翻译外文文献英文文献中小企业环境成本会计的实施IMPLEMENTING ENVIRONMENTAL COSTACCOUNTING IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZEDCOMPANIES1(ENVIRONMENTAL COST ACCOUNTING IN SMESSince its inception some 30 years ago, Environmental Cost Accounting (ECA) has reached a stage of development where individual ECA systems are separated fro
2、m the core accounting system based an assessment of environmental costs with (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 appe
3、ar to represent an appropriate basis for the implementation of ECA. Similar 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
4、et al., 1995, Letmathe, 1998, Spengler and H.hre, 1998).Taking available concepts 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 becontinuously revised to ensure that they wo
5、rk well when applied in small and medium-sized companies.Based on the framework 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 compan
6、y-related effects on environmental systems (see Burritt and Schaltegger, 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
7、 environmental systems are represented by physical environmentalinformation. Conventional accounting deals with bothmonetary as wellas physical units but does notfocus on environmental impact as such. To arrive at a practicalsolution to the implementation of ECA in a company accounting system, and t
8、o comply with the problem ofs existingdistinguishing 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 consumptio
9、n), the integration1of this information into the accounting system database is essential. From there, the generation of physical environmental and monetary (environmental) information would in many cases be feasible. For manycompanies, the priority would be monetary (environmental) information for u
10、se in for instance decisions regarding resource consumptions and investments. The use of ECA in small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) is still relatively rare, so practical examples available in theliterature are few and far between. One problem is that the definitionsof SMEs vary between countri
11、es (see Kosmider, 1993 and Reinemann, 1999). In our work the criteria 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 TurnoverUp to 500 employees Turnover up to EUR 50mManagement Organization- Owner-
12、cum-entrepreneur -Divisional organization is rare- Varies from a patriarchal management -Short flow of informationstylein traditional companies and teamwork -Strong personal commitment in start-up companies -Instruction and controlling with- Top-down planning in old companies direct personal contact
13、- Delegation is rare- Low level of formality- High flexibility- family company -easy to survey number of employees- limited possibilities of financing -wide expertise-high satisfaction of employeesSupply chain Innovation-closely involved in local -high potential of innovationeconomic cycles in speci
14、al fields- intense relationship with customers and suppliers2Keeping these characteristics in mind, the chosen ECA approachshould 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 increasingl
15、y implementing Enterprise 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 useof ERP systems is for planning and controlling production and administration processes of an enterprise. In SMEs however, they are often individually designed and thus not standardized making the integration of for instance software that supports
