Using resource consumption accounting in tourism businesses as a tool of strategic management accounting: The case of an accommodation enterprise

In today's business world, businesses that operate in all sectors must use an effective cost system to acquire a competitive advantage against the developments because traditional cost systems, which are conventional and can be used easily by businesses, cannot meet the needs in the face of commercial developments. For this reason, businesses seek alternative and new cost systems. Of course, the cost system of each period covered the business needs of that period; however, the constant changes and developments in commercial life pushed businesses to seek new systems after some time. Together with many other costing systems, Activity Based Costing, which was very popular in the accounting literature from the 1980s to the 2000s and is currently used by businesses, is the most famous among these techniques. However, there are some points where this technique, which was used for a long time, does not take into account the idle capacity sufficiently and is not practical in short-term decisions to be made. The Resource Consumption Accounting Technique emerged under such circumstances as a more up-to-date and contemporary cost system. Resource consumption accounting is a cost technique, which combines the resource perspective of the activity-based costing technique and German Cost Accounting, and reflects the idea that resources are the root cause of costs. When the literature was reviewed, it is striking that the applications related to Resource Consumption Accounting are mostly employed in the example of production enterprises. It was observed that there are very few applications regarding the use of this technique in service-producing enterprises. In the current study, the purpose was to determine the applicability of resource consumption accounting in accommodation enterprises, which is a service business, and to determine the differences between the existing cost system and service costs. It is considered that the scarcity of studies that use Resource Consumption Accounting will increase the contribution of this study to the literature, especially in service enterprises. The present study included the application of resource consumption accounting in line with the data of an accommodation business that continued its activities in the Alanya district of Antalya, which has the characteristic of a being 5-star facility and is considered our tourism capital. The data were given by the business itself on the condition that the name of the accommodation business remained confidential, and resource consumption accounting was applied by using the data of 2019. The accommodation business where the study was conducted had two service factors: Standard Room and Family Room Service. There were 167 Standard Room Services and 6 Family Room Services, and the related activities were front office, food & beverage, entertainment, and cleaning. The accommodation establishment, which worked with the all-included system, was open for a total of 153 days in the season, 31 days in May, 30 days in June, 31 days in July, 31 days in August, and 30 days in September. According to the results obtained in the present study, although the total calculated cost was 10.145.985.55 TL, the distributed costs were realized as 9.714.804.22 TL in total. According to these calculations, the idle resource cost of the said enterprise in the 2019 season is 431.181.06 TL in total. This shows that approximately 96% of the total costs were attributed to service factors, and nearly 4% of them were idle. When the traditional cost method of the accommodation business that was included in the study and the service factors of Resource Consumption Accounting were compared with daily unit costs, it was found that there was an idle resource cost of 6.24 TL for the Standard Room Service Factor and 16.34 TL for the Family Room Service Factor per day on a unit basis. In this regard, the unit-based idle resource cost that results from the application of Resource Consumption Accounting will not be transferred to the costs of these service factors, to ensure that the service factors and the prices to be applied will not rise unnecessarily, customer demand will increase with the low price, which will provide a competitive advantage for the business.