This study purports to present an investigation of the current cost accounting practices in the selected pharmaceutical companies of Bangladesh. Through a combination of illustrative and cumulative case study of five randomly selected pharmaceutical companies, this study finds that the sampled companies, in general, have a high ratio of product costs to period costs, a higher degree of operating leverage, a number of discretionary costs, absence of activity based management, reliance on budgets for planning and controlling costs and primarily apply process costing method for product costing, absorption costing for internal reporting and tend to avoid complex methods in favor of simply understandable methods even at the cost of accuracy. This study recommends the introduction of the concepts of activity based management, total quality management, life cycle costing, six sigma principles and balanced scorecard to reflect the recent developments in the cost accounting of the pharmaceutical companies to ensure better control, greater effectiveness and a more informed management. The major limitations of this study involve the lack of previous research concerning the same topic in Bangladesh, the unavailability of cost accounting information and inadvertence of management to share internal data on grounds of confidentiality. An important finding is that managers, in general, are less informed about the overall organizational practices of cost accounting and tend to concentrate on own areas. This study is expected to add value to the cost accounting stakeholders of the country along with academicians, corporations, management, students and the public in general through refining their views about the cost accounting practices in Bangladesh.
Financial Reporting, Cost Accounting, Cost Accounting Methods, Costing, Budgeting
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