Theoretical Concepts and Practical Applications of Accounting-Related Shared Service Centres in Medium-Sized Firms

The idea of sharing services is not really a new one; much more it represents the status quo of organisational development. A vast number of large companies worldwide have benefited from the use of shared services in the last decades. Due to its success, this approach is also gaining increasing attention by medium-sized companies, which steadily start to implement shared service centres (SSCs). Because there is not much empirical on this topic, this chapter aims to shed light on the design, the implementation and the controlling instruments of an SSC in accounting departments of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Our work highlights the means and ends of practical application of prevailing theories on the subject. The nucleus of this work is derived from qualitative data obtained from several semi-structured interviews, which were conducted with eight experts from different companies and two business consultants. We hereby emphasised on the practical application of scholarly research in different aspects such as organisational concepts, generic processes and economic feasibility studies.