Overview of cost accounting practices in France from the early 19th century to the 1880s

Abstract

The article explores changes in costing practices over forty decades from 1820 to 1880 in France. Its main purpose is to contribute to the dynamic history of changes in cost accounting methods. This dynamic is contained within a broad view of how costing methods have evolved. In industry, the methods became more complex in order to achieve greater precision, as in the agricultural sector, except that in the latter case, criticism of too much complexity started to arise. In the field of railway transport, accounting advances were made with a view to complying with legal obligations. As for the sophisticated models devised by the engineers during this period, they were not applied until a century later. Instead, rather simple methods prevailed: the equivalence methods. Costing methods wavered between a search for precision at the price of increased complexity, and a search for simplification to the detriment of precision, but not to the point where we could call this a cyclical phenomenon.