Businesses can benefit from various Costing facilities in Tally.ERP 9. Essential costing functions are listed below:
Optimise Costs Using Cost Centre & Categories

A business, for achieving optimum cost-effectiveness, assigns its controllable costs to cost centres. Any unit of the organisation to which costs can be allocated is a Cost Centre. For Example: Branches, Departments, Projects, Products, Persons and so on.

Tally.ERP 9 enables a business to allocate transactions to Cost Centres. For example, besides the ledger-wise accounting allocation, a transaction may be allocated amongst different Branches. Tally.ERP 9 allows to compare one Cost Centre with another, hence provides information regarding the performance of each Cost / Profit Centre.

Cost Category is a cluster of related cost centres. Cost Categories allows parallel allocation of the same transaction in multiple dimensions. In many cases, a single transaction may have to be allocated to more than one type of Cost Centre. Cost Categories enable allocating costs to parallel sets of Cost Centres i.e. the same amount can be allocated to more than one cost centre.
Cost Centre Reports

Category Summary:
This report displays the summary of all the cost centres under a cost category.

Cost Centre Break-up:
This report displays Ledger and Group summary information for the selected cost centre.

Ledger Break-up:
This report displays the summary information of all Cost Centres for the selected Ledger.

Group Break-up:
This report displays the summary information of all Cost Centres for the selected Group.

Automatic Cost Allocation & Control:
Cost Centre Classes are used to automate Cost Centre allocations in transactions. You can use cost centre classes if you do not wish to manually allocate amounts to cost centres in each entry.

Cost Estimation & Control:
Cost estimation is the process of pre-determining the cost of a certain product job or order. Such pre-determination may be required for several purposes. Some of the purposes are as follows:

• Budgets & Variance
• Preparation of financial statements (valuation of stocks)
• Job Costing

Budgets & Variance:
Budget is a detailed plan of income and expenses expected over a certain period of time. A budget can provide guidelines for managing future investments and expenses. Every Business has its objectives and goals and must have an efficient mechanism to set its targets and appraisal of achievements in respect of the target.

To achieve the important managerial controls, Tally.ERP 9 provides the flexible system of Budgets for Group, Ledger or Cost Centres. Tally.ERP 9 allows creating multiple Budgets for different purposes. For Example: Sales budget, Expenses budget, etc. You can compare the actual performance with budge created and also get variance report to ensure corrective measures, if required.

Stock Valuation:
Tally.ERP 9 allows you to view the effects of different stock valuation methods on the closing stock value. You can view a columnar display of different stock valuations.

Each stock item can be set up to have a different stock valuation method (E.g. Average Cost, Average price, Last Purchase cost, Last Sales price, FIFO). In some instances, a particular method of valuation may be required, for example, to assess the replacement value or saleable value of stock. Tally.ERP 9 displays stocks in any or all the valuation methods dynamically and simultaneously, without any complicated procedure.

Job Costing:
Job Costing is a form of specific order costing, which applies to a job undertaken according to customer requirements and specifications. It applies to industries which produce definite products against individual orders from customers.

Some industries where job costing plays an important role are: construction, manufacturing, printing, automobile, etc.

Tally.ERP 9 offers comprehensive Job Costing that helps businesses in project / job order mode to estimate costs and track them.