Abstract
This paper reports on the findings of a postal questionnaire that examines the extent to which potential contextual
factors influence the characteristics of product costing systems. Prior research has mostly used the adoption or
non-adoption of ABC systems to capture the characteristics of product costing systems. This research has generally
been inconclusive and has been unable to establish strong links between ABC adoption and those contextual factors
that have been identified in the literature that are conducive to the adoption of ABC systems. Instead of using only
the adoption or non-adoption of ABC systems as a measure of product cost system design this research uses four
different proxy measures of cost system sophistication to capture the characteristics of the product costing systems.
This allows for a more robust test of the relations among the predictor variables and cost system sophistication.
Results indicate that higher levels of cost system sophistication are positively associated with the importance of
cost information, extent of use of other innovative management accounting techniques, intensity of the competitive
environment, size, extent of the use of JIT/lean production techniques and the type of business sector. No association
was found between the level of cost system sophistication and cost structure, product diversity and quality of
information technology.