Abstract

Companies implement quality management systems to be more competitive and achieve organizational objectives efficiently; Quality is essential for any type of company and is present in all the processes that are designed with the purpose of guiding the company towards a culture of continuous improvement. Managing and ensuring quality within any industry has a cost and an impact on the finances of the organization; Traditional cost accounting has the purpose of predetermining, recording, accumulating, distributing, controlling, analyzing, interpreting and reporting the costs of production, distribution, administration and financing for the internal use of managers, however this approach analyzes costs quality as an added part of the manufacturing processes, making a deeper analysis of quality costs difficult; Due to the impact that managing quality can have within an organization and the shortcomings of traditional techniques, it is considered important to be able to analyze quality costs in greater detail and without this posing a problem for organizations.
This research develops a methodology that allows companies to identify, quantify and manage quality costs from an accounting perspective. The methodology used has a transversal approach and analyzes companies as generic entities without focusing on a specific activity or sector. As a result, a process map is proposed to identify where the main quality costs are located and in which macro-processes they are generated; The macro-processes considered are classified into three categories: i) strategic process, ii) operational process and iii) support process. Then a chart of accounts is presented that allows recording the different costs related to quality, considering two groups of costs, costs to ensure quality and non-quality costs. The first ones refer to those costs that are generated to do things right from the first time; Also included are the costs that originate in the production and auditing of the process to measure compliance with the pre-established specifications. Non-quality costs include those costs that occur when activities are not performed well from the first time, these costs are generated due to errors made by the company and that are detected before the product is delivered to the customer. It also includes all those costs due to errors incurred by the producer and that occur when the product has already been delivered to the customer. Finally, indexes are proposed for the management of the identified costs, these indexes allow direct comparisons with the total quality costs, as well as making comparisons with the total sales, production costs and others according to the needs of the company. Once the indices have been defined, quality costs can be more efficiently and easily evaluated. 
The method and results are consistent with traditional accounting and operations management, and it does not involve the use of a parallel accounting system or practice, and it can also be combined with business management tools such as ERP systems. This method can be of special interest to small and medium-sized companies due to the complexity and cost of having commercial ERP systems that perform this type of analysis.