Theoretical Aspects of Costs Management in the Enterprise

Abstract

The article is aimed at researching the theoretical aspects of enterprise costs management: researching the approaches to defining the nature of costs, classifying them, and applying principles, methods and management functions to improve the efficiency of managerial decisions. The essence of the concepts of «costs» and «management of enterprise costs» are researched. According to the results of comparative analysis it is defined that there is no single concept of these categories in the scientific literature, views on these categories among scholars are very different. The costs are classified, depending on management objectives, on three following directions: costs for defining the self-cost of production and gain of profit, valuation of stocks; costs for making managerial decisions and planning; costs for implementing the process of control and regulation. In order to improve the costs management process in the enterprise, theoretical bases of management are researched and supplemented as follows: principles, functions, methods. The principles are defined in accordance with the general management principles and the special principles regarding the costs of enterprise. These principles can serve as a basis and set the direction of the entire system of cost management, for each enterprise they should be defined in view of its features, both economic and organizational. The functions of costs management in the enterprise are proposed to be defined in accordance with such elements of the management cycle: planning and forecasting, organization, motivation, accounting and analysis, control. In order to improve the management of enterprise costs, consisting in a search for costs optimization and ensuring their planned level, the basic methods of cost management are considered. The following methods of the management of enterprise costs are researched: direct-costing, target-costing, kaizen-costing, benchmarking of costs, accounting by functions, LCC analysis, theory of limitations.

Keywords

• enterprise costs
• management
• principles
• functions
• methods