Key takeaways
- CKL Kostenrechnung 365 extends Business Central with a dedicated cost accounting circle rather than just additional reports.
- It covers cost centre accounting with a split into fixed and variable components, cost object accounting, overhead allocation and the German operating cost sheet (BAB).
- Multi-level contribution margin accounting is the point at which the standard and dimensions alone stop being enough.
- Depending on setup, suitable for trading, service and manufacturing companies.
- The vendor is CKL Software GmbH, Hamburg.
Where the standard's dimensions stop
Dimensions are a good tool in Business Central for tagging postings: by department, project, region. For the question of which department caused which costs, they are often enough.
They stop where tagging turns into calculation. A dimension cannot allocate. It cannot distribute overheads across cost centres by a key, it cannot distinguish fixed from variable components, and it cannot build contribution margins across several levels. Those three things are the core of cost accounting.
The usual way out is an export to Excel, where the allocations are then rebuilt by hand. That works as long as one person does it and nobody asks how a figure came about. It stops working the moment the calculation has to be traceable, or that person is on holiday.
What a dedicated cost accounting circle means
The essential difference is not the number of reports but that cost accounting gets its own calculation circle. It takes values from the financial books but continues to calculate by its own rules — with imputed values, allocations and internal charges that have no place in the financial accounts.
In practice that means the financial accounts stay what they have to be: the basis for year-end and tax. Controlling gets an area alongside it where it can calculate without bending the bookkeeping. That is exactly the separation larger systems have always had and mid-sized companies often lack.
From that separation follow the analyses people typically look for: profit centre statements, cost object views after overhead allocation, multi-level contribution margin accounting, and the operating cost sheet.
- Cost centre accounting with a consistent split into fixed and variable components
- Cost objects: products, product groups or services that ultimately carry the costs
- Overhead allocation by defined keys
- Multi-level contribution margin accounting
- Operating cost sheet (BAB) and profit centre statements
The preparation nobody can do for you
Cost accounting is not a module you switch on. The software provides the frame; the content comes from the business — and that is the part that gets underestimated.
To settle in advance: which cost centres genuinely exist, and do they match the organisational structure? What are the cost objects — individual items, product groups, projects? By what keys are overheads distributed, and who decides those keys? And how many levels should the contribution margin calculation have?
Those are commercial decisions, not system settings. Experience says this preparation is where the actual value sits: many companies discover for the first time that several departments hold different views of what a product costs.
Frequently asked questions
- For tagging and analysing postings, often yes. As soon as you want to allocate overheads, separate fixed from variable, or calculate contribution margins across several levels, they are not — dimensions simply lack the calculation logic. The honest test: if your controlling team keeps calculating after the export, you have reached the limit.
- That depends less on company size than on whether you base decisions on contribution margins. A trading company with a few product groups and a clear margin rarely needs it. Anyone manufacturing, costing projects, or working on thin margins across many items usually needs it sooner than they think.
- No, and that is precisely the point of a separate calculation circle: the financial accounts stay unchanged and supply the values, while cost accounting calculates alongside. What usually creates work is not the bookkeeping but defining cost centres, cost objects and allocation keys cleanly.
- The technical setup is manageable. The duration is set by the groundwork: how clearly cost centres and cost objects are defined, whether allocation keys are agreed, and how many levels the contribution margin calculation should have. Companies already doing this in Excel are considerably faster — their logic only has to be reproduced.