Accounting for service value - An ontological approach

With the growing importance of services in the modern enterprise there is a need for innovating traditional management accounting practices. In the Service Science literature, some work has been devoted to service accounting but mainly on a conceptual level. To address this research challenge, we have built an integrated service accounting framework on top of the business ontology REA. The e3value model is a useful tool to give an overall picture of a service network, which can be combined smoothly with the more detailed REA model. The result has been evaluated on the basis of the requirements and with an example from online gaming. As far as we know, it is the first worked out service accounting framework in Service Science and allows giving often-used concepts as value-in-use a precise definition.