The Essence of Cost as an Accounting and Economic Category

The main purpose of the industrial enterprise is to ensure its sustainable development. This can be achieved by constantly seeking and implementing measures to improve the economic efficiency of management. Cost is one of the indicators that affects the efficiency of economic activity of the enterprise and its structural units. It concentrates the main indicators of economic and production activities, namely: the efficiency of financial, material, labor and other resources, and hence the quality of employees and the enterprise as a whole, their advantages, achievements and losses and shortcomings. Cost directly affects the profitability, profit and financial result of economic activity. The main aim of the article is the analysis and generalization of approaches to interpretations of the concept of cost, the role and importance of the cost indicator in production management, its place in the economic mechanism of management. Theoretical general scientific research methods (analysis, abstraction, generalization, classification, etc.) have been used. The article emphasizes that the cost should be understood as the value of the cost of resources used in the production and sale of products. The study showed that the cost, as a generalizing economic indicator, reflects all aspects of the enterprise: the degree of technological equipment of production and development of technological processes, the level of organization of production and labor, the degree of capacity utilization, economy of material and labor resources and other conditions and factors that characterize production and economic activities. The practical significance of the obtained results is to clarify the meaning of the concept of cost as a generalizing economic indicator. The scientific novelty of the study is to determine the feasibility of taking into account in the formation of the cost indicator not only the cost of resources used in the process of achieving certain goals, but also the costs associated with the risky, innovative nature of entrepreneurship. Further research will be aimed at finding new methods and factors to reduce the cost of production of enterprises in Ukraine.