Industry-Specialized Accounting in Thailand

Choosing a cost unit that matches how the business earns

Construction contracting takes the project as its cost unit, separating materials, labour, subcontractors and the overheads allocated in. A hotel starts from room nights sold, then follows average rate and variable cost per room night alongside fixed monthly cost. A factory uses production orders or product families, with raw materials tracked against the recipe and actual scrap recorded. A clinic uses procedure type or attending doctor, since revenue-sharing is a large cost block. Transport uses trips or vehicle registration, so fuel, repairs and depreciation are visible per unit.

Whatever unit is chosen must be captured at the point of work, not guessed later by the accounts team. So we design source documents with a cost-unit code on every one: material requisitions, timesheets, repair orders and supplier invoices. Without that code the cost report degenerates into an allocation by revenue share, which hides loss-making jobs inside the company average.

Common posting errors and what they cost

Construction commonly recognises revenue ahead of work performed by following the billing schedule, so early months look strong and the losses pile into the final claim. We therefore reconcile work performed against amounts billed each month. Factories often value inventory at standard cost and never post the variances, so gross margin drifts cumulatively. Hotels tend to expense a major refurbishment entirely in the month of payment, making monthly results swing so hard that no trend can be read.

Another frequent group is site cash spending without documents that qualify as deductible expenditure: daily labour, small transport charges and purchases from tiny suppliers. Left alone, this produces two problems at once — understated cost reports and disallowed deductions later. The workable fix is a petty-cash form naming the payee, the job, the date and an approver, with a firm limit per payment.

The monthly figures an owner should receive

We always send three pages. The first is overall performance against the prior month and the same period last year. The second is profit by cost unit, ranked best to worst, so it is immediately clear which work should be declined or repriced. The third is expected cash in and out over the next sixty days, which matters most where money goes out early — contracting and made-to-order production.

Alongside the accounting figures we include the operating measures the business actually uses: occupancy and revenue per available room for hotels; scrap rate and machine downtime for factories; daily patient count and average revenue per visit for clinics; cost per kilometre for transport. Putting both sets on one page shifts the conversation from checking last month's books to deciding on pricing and capacity.

When to act, and when waiting is fine

• You run more than three jobs at once

  Split cost by project now; a retrospective allocation will not reflect real labour and rework

• You hold many stock items and produce to order

  Set standards with a review cycle; do not carry the same figures across years unchecked

• Revenue depends on daily service capacity

  Measure fixed cost per unit of capacity so the break-even point is known before discounting

• Site cash payments happen routinely

  Put a form and approval limits in place before scaling up, or both cost data and deductibility suffer