What is Project Accounting?

Project accounting is a type of managerial accounting oriented toward the goals of project management and delivery. It involves tracking, reporting, and analyzing financial results and implications, and sometimes the creation of financial reports designed to track the financial progress of projects; the information generated by this analysis is used to aid project management. While project accounting was traditionally used for large construction, engineering, and government projects, it has now expanded into several other sectors. It is commonly used by government contractors, where the ability to account for costs by contract can be a requirement for interim payments. A specialized form of project accounting, production accounting, is used by production studios to track an individual movie or television episode's costs.