As industrial society is being replaced by computerizational society, cost accounting is now faced with the need of a radical reform. The trinary cost system for industrial society has lost its usefulness at automated factories. This paper discussed the way to reconstruct cost system for automated factories, a subject which has increased in importance in recent years. The writer proposes the quaternary cost system. The following points are the essential of the quaternary cost system designed to suit automated factories:

(1) classifying the cost elements by transaction form into “material cost,” “equipment cost,” “labor cost,” and “expenses.”

(2) dividing equipment cost into “equipment maintenance cost” and “equipment working cost.”

(3) calculating the cost of productive equipments based on the operating hours spent for products as “direct equipment cost.”

(4) computing direct equipment cost and direct labor cost as“direct conversion cost”, and dividing it into “set-up cost” and “substantial conversion cost.”

(5) costing as “direct inner-expenses” the cost of sub-operating incurred by products.

(6) grouping other costs into “indirect conversion cost” and “manufacturing management cost.”

(7) finding out the “by-cost” and adding up it to the “major-cost.”

In this paper, the prototype of Expert System which judges the customers' creditability was constructed for the financing business of the bank, and this system was used on given examples to show the usability. This system deals with how the experts judge the non-numeric data, presupposing that the numerical values of the financial affairs have already been analyzed. For this purpose, rules are set considering ten basic elements, and the judgment of whether the financing is approved or disapproved is made according to the resulting final decision making rules.

In the process, such a case may be found where the business is admissible but negotiation is necessary for approval by presenting further conditions to the customer. To cope with such a case, conditional improvement points are displayed in this system.

Moreover, this system has a characteristic of including “Knowledge arrangement support tool” using spreadsheets:

There is a problem of the knowledge base construction in Expert System construction. And the problem in this stage of whether there is any omission in the knowledge collection from the experts, or whether there is any contradiction among the knowledge collection is solved by the matrix on the spreadsheets.

Activity based costing systems emerged in the West during the mid 1980s in order to improve product costing. However as activity analysis was applied to organizations it became apparent that the technique had a considerably wider potential than indicated by this single initial objective.

This paper explores a number of other areas within the field of cost management to which ABC has contributed. These comprise the analysis of cost behavior, customer profitability analysis, activity cost profiling, budgeting and cost control and performance mesurement.

While there is danger in viewing ABC as a panacea which will solve all costing problems at a stroke, it is an approach which offers interesting and valuable insights into how costs can be effectively managed.

It has been nearly 30 years since the first cost and profit engineering system in the product design phase (CAPES) were introduced in Japan. Various opinions have been expressed as to what CAPES conclusive definition has yet been reached. It is dynamic growing concept and today more and more implementations and interpretations are coming about.

Then, a definition of CAPES will be given as follows.

CAPES is the application of scientific printciples and technologies to establish a cost target, make breakdown of the cost target, estimate the cost or design alternatives, and improve the cost. CAPES is adopted these technologies through the development and design phase in order to realize product specification cost within the cost target that is included life cycle cost (LCC): development, design, manufacturing, distribution, sales, usage, and disposal costs.

CAPES can also be called management concept and methodology to make new products at a “resonable cost” -a cost that can be achieved through product development and design activities to meet all the required target.

Main purposes in this paper have described the concept of CAPES and methodologies for setting and breakdown the cost target for manufacturing based on our survey for big companies of manufacturing industries in Japan. These are the core of CAPES.

Kirin Brewery Co., Ltd. (KB) saw its rapid decline of business performance from 1987 to 1989 from its failure to adapt to great changes in the beer market. Faced with this situtation, KB began to adopt radical policies such as divisionalized organization, a new sales organization and personnel management system for fundamental reformation of its corporate culture. Also, the Management Reporting System (MRS) is the profit management system which was introduced in the beer division in 1990 as a part of the new policies. KB has aimed at reconstruction in which the traditional centralized management system controlled by the head office would change into a decentralized management system by delegating authority to the branch managers.

KB constructed the reporting system which could provide useful information on the true profit contribution of each branch as a first-line sales unit. This system could be built by changing the traditional system for income measurement for the company as a whole into the new system for branch marginal profit measurement by direct costing. To get the information provided through the new system in a timely manner, it is necessary to construct computer-based systems, i.e. a sales-information system and an expense-management system which could recognize expenses on an accrual basis, and provide timely expense information of each management segment. KB has set marginal profit, sales volume and market share as the performance targets for each branch manager, and has reinforced the authority of the branches over outlays such as marketing expenses.

Currently Takenaka has its original computerized accounting system which controls over two thousands of construction projects in progress. From the viewpoint of managerial accounting, this system has the following objectives:

① Project budget calculation system

To decide the most reasonable cost by the budget planning simulation whch is applied to the individual projects (as VE activity), when we estimate the project budget at the phase of planning and change the budget during the construction phase because of the various reasons.

② The allocation of interest cost and managemant fee

To properly evaluate the individual projects by recognizing their respective profits, the interest cost shall be allocated as management cost based on the cash flow per project. In addition, the costs of our design department shall be also allocated as management fee.

③ Project budget to actual cost control

To calculate this object quickly.

On the other hand, we are now redeveloping a new stratagic computerized accounting information system-by which our system will be converted from the data-processing type into the data-utilizing type.

New system is expected to construct high-value added data-base combining the data of personnel, material, finance and any other information, and to make these data available on a real time base for the effective corporate managemant.