Accounting is a process by which financial information is obtained to facilitate users to diagnosis and decision making. Accounting Accounting is divided into external and internal accounting.

External accounting (or financial) has as its main objective to obtain historical information on the relationship between the organization and outside. The main exponent of this information are the annual accounts, the integrated balance sheet, income statement, statement of changes in equity, cash flow statement and memory. This is about the global organization valued in monetary units, which must make under the current accounting regulations.

Thus, during the preparation of the budget allocated spending targets in order to predict what will be the resource requirements for the organization during the next period.

The internal accounting (or management) is a branch of accounting which aims to capture, measure and evaluate the internal circulation and streamlining it and control it with the aim of providing relevant information to the organization to take decisions.

Management accounting is internal and subjective, so each organization can use the system administration or management accounting that seems more suited to your needs.

Much of the information used in management accounting comes from financial accounting (eg costs that occurred during the period) while also providing management accounting information in financial accounting (eg information to establish the price of the service provided to users).

Cost accounting (or accounting) is one of the parts of management accounting and focuses on the calculation of costs of services rendered or products offered by the organization.

Cost accounting includes all the costs of the organization and assigned to products, services, departments or clients, for example, according to information needs.

In terms of its objectives should be highlighted obtaining information with a short-term perspective, in order:

• Know the costs of the different units of the organization and products obtained or services provided.
• Analyze the process of generating the accounting profit.
• Contributing to the reduction and control of costs.
• Make strategic decisions: to eliminate a service or enhance it, outsource a service or a stage of the production process, or set rates and fees discount.

To facilitate the comparison of data with those for previous years, it is important that the system for calculating costs is consistent throughout the years because otherwise you lose the ability to make the data comparable. Furthermore, when comparing data from one service with another service should costing systems are similar, and the same way to compare different services provided in municipalities, it is necessary that s' using the same criteria.