4.2. Types of computing systems of costing and their relationship with the small and medium enterprises’ goals
A key aspect in the costing system of an organization is precisely the use given to it positing the second hypothesis (H2): the propor- tion of firms using real or historic cost systems is higher than those using the standard costing. In this case it was questioned in the survey whether they were using any costing system and what they were trying to get from it, and what the options in this survey were if their results were used for the elaboration of financial statements, the costing management of the enterprise, margin management, as an adoption base or for the decision-making process.
It was observed that 36% of the enterprises using traditional sys- tems use a real or historical costing system, followed by a standard costing system with 9%, and the variable costing system with 5%. In the case of their production, 11% use an order based costing system, and the process costing system is used by 6%. Another important aspect is the fact that the 28% do not use a costing system; of this last category, 73% are commercial enterprises, 19% service enterprises and 8% industrial enterprises (basing their management method on the production supervisors’ experience, and the accounting depart- ment on general accountability and Microsoft Excel). Among the companies using the ABC system, 28% use the historic costing sys- tem, followed by the standard costing system with 16%; with regard to their way of production, 15% use the costing system by order and 12% use the costing system by process. Thus the hypothesis is accepted (Table 5).
The SMEs that use traditional systems gave greater importance to their costing systems on the basis of their financial statement elaboration and they mostly use the historic costing system to achieve this. Along this same line, it can be observed that those using a variable costing system and the costing by order give more importance to their margin management, while those using the standard costing system give priority to management costing and those who use the full costing system give priority to the decision- making process (Table 6).
In Table 7, we can see which of the objectives are used for each of the costing system from the ABC users, and the type of costing system most used in the historic costing system for decision taking, margin management and preparation of financial statements. The users that have direct costing give priority to decision and margin management.