Product Costing
In process-intensive manufacturing environments, cost accountants spend a lot of time trying to uncover the true product cost of the items they make. Setting standard costs is a complicated exercise that must account for multiple production lines and/or locations, varied machine efficiencies, currency effects, labor rates, and raw material prices. Calculating actual costs requires access to detailed production results and logic that replicates the manufacturing process. Other factors like tracking parent-child relationships and accruing costs at each work-in-process (WIP) point are required to give a complete result.
Cost accountants need flexibility to perform the level of analysis required to develop cost models and often turn to spreadsheet applications. But in an effort to build more specific product cost models, they inadvertently introduce another set of problems. Questions about data integrity, security, versioning, sharing and reporting arise along with the potential disparities in the logic used to calculate results. With this cadre of problems, many business leaders lack confidence in the results and in turn make uninformed business decisions.
ImpactECS is a costing platform that allows end-users to build sophisticated models without writing code or involving IT resources. The defined set of tools offers flexibility similar to spreadsheet applications where the model builder can construct the logic based on a set of business criteria they define. There is no pre-determined methodology with ImpactECS, so companies can choose their selected accounting approach or build multiple models that represent different methodologies.
The flexibility of ImpactECS is where the similarities to spreadsheets end. ImpactECS is a fully-integrated system that centralizes cost data in a secure environment. End users can calculate results and share them with the integrated reporting tool or by exporting information to existing data warehouses and Microsoft® Excel. And, the power of the core calculation engine allows models to compute results at speeds significantly faster than a spreadsheet application.
