Project accounting
Accounting systems geared toward project management
Project accounting is a type of managerial accounting oriented toward the goals of project management and delivery. It involves tracking, reporting, and analyzing financial results and implications, and sometimes the creation of financial reports designed to track the financial progress of projects; the information generated by this analysis is used to aid project management.
Project accounting is traditionally used for large construction, engineering, and government projects. It is commonly used by government contractors, where the ability to account for costs by contract, and sometimes by individual contract line item [CLIN], is often a requirement for interim payments. A specialized form of project accounting, production accounting, is used by production studios to track an individual movie or television episode's costs.
The capital budget processes of large corporations and governmental entities are chiefly concerned with major investment projects, which typically have significant upfront costs and benefits realized over the long term. Investment "go/no-go" decisions are largely based on net present value assessments; project accounting and cost/benefit analyses provide vital feedback on the quality of those decisions.
Practice
Projects (which may be independent undertakings or occur as part of a larger program) differ from a company's routine activities in a number of ways: they frequently involve efforts across departmental boundaries, and their budgets may be revised many times over the course of their execution (which can range from days to years). Accordingly, in a project accounting paradigm, certain projects are considered separate entities in the course of working on products which require separate financial management, a task for which existing management accounting and financial accounting techniques are often insufficient.
Project accounting (which involves elements of management accounting and financial accounting) is differentiated by a number of unique practices:
A separate accounting system or cost center is used to track and report project-specific transactions with revenues, costs, assets, and liabilities identified and allocated to the project.
The public source identifies “Project accounting” as accounting systems geared toward project management. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Project, accounting and Accounting.
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This entry incorporates text from “Project accounting” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.