Unfortunately, in many of the poorer economies of the world, the simple mechanisms of the value-added tax pose an incredible burden on small business. Complying with the paperwork necessary to declare your tax and pay it is a barrier that forces many companies into the informal economy. People are simply not in organisations that are visible to the statistical or taxation authorities. Larger companies will completely change their internal communication flows. Most companies do not know their costs.
Cost accounting is an intellectual exercise.
People think it s boring. It s fundamentally challenging to allocate the costs of running an enterprise to a particular product. It s done in an arbitrary way. One could change the price of a product by a factor of two or three, and still succeed if you have other products you can shift costs to. That s why I ve always been intrigued by these notions of dumping when, in fact, many times these prices are artificial.