Responsibility Centre – Managerial Accounting Instrument

Abstract

The survey of industrial companies indicates that the majority of managers use information about total costs or, at best, production costs, to make managerial decisions about the effectiveness of products or services. These indicators, being characteristic of financial accounting, are calculated with great approximation on the types of products or services. Marginal costs, as an object of managerial accounting, are very rarely used in the decision-making process, because the existing expense accounting systems of most companies are not able to produce such information. Traditional accounting systems accumulate and process financial information in accordance with financial accounting principles, without tracking and separating variable and fixed costs, which would allow a clearer determination of the direct costs incurred by specific products and services. Thus, the article presents some theoretical and practical aspects regarding the implementation of responsibility centre as tools for decentralizing responsibilities through the principles of managerial accounting, which allow the accumulation and management of costs and expenses on decision-making areas of company subdivisions.