The problem of centralized accounting has been advanced by the entire practice of socialist construction: the implementation of the sectoral principle of management, the widespread use of automated systems in the national economy and the associated use of electronic computers, the further improvement and reduction in cost of the management apparatus and the reduction of expenditures on its maintenance. For the coal industry, in connection with the elimination of multi-level management and the creation of production associations, this problem is especially important. It is necessary to study it comprehensively and to adopt such decisions as would contribute to transforming centralized accounting into a real management function with all the qualities inherent in that function.

The problems of economic analysis in the coal industry began to be studied in 1921–1927. This period includes works in which not only the relevance of one or another indicator was studied, but also the methodology of analyzing labor productivity, production cost and profitability was carefully developed. In these and subsequent years, a beginning was made in technical-and-economic analysis of production cost and labor productivity. ...

In connection with the fact that the development of the socialist national economy is ensured by internal savings, which are determined by the reduction of production costs, the importance of this indicator is extremely great. The task of reducing production costs is of particular importance at the present time, when the Communist Party and the Soviet government continue to develop heavy industry at a high rate and at the same time organize a steep rise in agriculture and the production of consumer goods. In order for the struggle to fulfill and overfulfill cost plans to proceed successfully, it is necessary to organize systematic and careful control over their implementation. The most important means of such control is reporting on the production costs. In modern literature on accounting in the coal industry, insufficient attention is paid to the issues of constructing production costs reports. This article provides a number of practical proposals for improving production costs reports in coal mines in order to improve control over the fulfillment and overfulfillment of plans to reduce coal costs.