| The software industry is a typical representative industry of innovative technology in China.With the booming of this industry,the ever-changing market environment has led to increasing demand for customization of individual software and increasing variability in indirect costs such as design costs and system commissioning costs for individual customers,which places higher requirements for cost accounting of software projects.However,the cost accounting method that most software companies are using is traditional cost method,which has single cost driver and insufficient causal correlation with the way costs are incurred.To a certain extent,this will result in distortion of software project costs and unscientific decisions by the company in terms of project pricing and performance evaluation,which also affects the management’s judgment of the company’s situation(Hou Bo,2021).Based on this,this paper tries to apply the activity-based costing method(the ABC method)to the software industry and explore its application in software project costing.This paper selects the Y software project of RS Software Company as the research object.In the application process,firstly,the paper identifies 9 major activity phases in the software development process of RS Software Company,corresponding to 18 specific activities,and each activity is divided into 4 major activity centers according to the nature of the activity.Secondly,the paper analyzes the project resources,resource drivers and cost drivers based on the cost components of the software project;calculates the total amount of resources,total number of drivers and resource sharing rate;and then allocates each indirect cost to each activity center according to the sharing rate to get the indirect cost of Y software project under the ABC method.In the meantime,the accounting results of Y software project under the ABC method are compared with those under the current traditional costing method to show the superiority of the ABC method.On this basis,the paper analyzes the effect of introducing the ABC method at RS Software Company on guiding the company’s business management decisions and the enlightening effect of cost accounting for software projects.Finally,to guarantee the smooth implementation of the ABC method in RS Software Company,the steps are divided into four stages including preparation stage,trial run stage,formal implementation stage and result application stage,and the key points that should be paid attention to in the four stages and the five guarantee measures for implementation are given.The conclusions obtained in this paper are as follows: Firstly,it is necessary to introduce the ABC method to achieve accurate cost allocation of software projects for RS Software Company with fast changing market demand,high variability of indirect costs and high proportion of manufacturing costs to total cost.For Y software project,the ABC method selects cost drivers with higher causal correlation with the way of cost generation,and the calculated indirect costs are approximately 8.75% lower than those under the traditional cost method.Secondly,applying the ABC method to RS Software Company not only improves the reference value of cost information in the product pricing process,but also utilizes the current performance evaluation mechanism as a positive incentive for employees,and thus has important guiding significance for both external pricing decisions and internal management decisions of RS Software Company.Finally,this paper takes the software development process as the key entry point for applying the ABC method to classify activities and select activity drivers.By analyzing the software development process and classifying activity centers to attribute software project costs,this paper provides some new ideas and insights for applying the ABC method to improve the value of cost information in the software industry,which is less studied at present. |
