Cost accounting Practices: Survey at Vietnamese Small-medium Enterprises

In the market economy, the role of cost management accounting information is increasingly expanding and affirming its development position. The importance of cost information to management activities has raised the need to develop a method capable of providing appropriate, timely, and reliable cost information for planning, control and use resources, evaluate performance and make business decisions. The article surveys 130 small and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam, to evaluate the level of cost accounting practices in enterprises. Survey results show that small and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam are most interested in process costing methods, complexity in production is the biggest difficulty that businesses encounter when determining product costs, the most commonly used basis for allocating overhead costs is production output, pricing decisions are the decisions that use cost information the most, and reducing profits is the biggest reason why managers care about cost information.