PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OF IT ENTERPRISES: A METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH BASED ON VARIABLE COST AND MARGINAL PROFIT ANALYSIS

Abstract

The article addresses topical issues of performance management in IT enterprises operating under conditions of high service complexity (multi-product range) and significant dependence on human capital. It is substantiated that, to ensure financial stability and profit maximization, a critical transition is required from traditional accounting methods to managerial accounting tools focused on determining the most appropriate units for measuring resources and output. Marginal Profit (MP) occupies a central place in the research, as it isolates the impact of variable costs and serves as the basis for calculating efficiency indicators. It is shown that the performance management of an IT enterprise essentially comes down to the analysis and management of marginal profit and its variable cost components. It is established that due to the extreme complexity and uniqueness of IT services, the use of natural volume indicators (such as "program," "service unit," or "lines of code") or monetary measures is analytically inefficient, incorrect, and leads to the distortion of financial results. In particular, it is revealed that payment based on "lines of code" encourages low code quality and ignores critical development stages (analysis, testing, refactoring). Conversely, the person-hour of work is justified as a universal and economically correct measure of output and the main resource in an IT enterprise (the working time of programmers). The dual, synergistic role of the person-hour is proven: it is simultaneously an indicator of consumed resources (the basis for calculating labour costs) and an indicator of the final result (the unit of services rendered), which makes it an ideal foundation for calculating the performance indicators of IT enterprises. The structure of an IT enterprise's variable costs is analyzed in detail, the basis of which is the average hourly wage of the core personnel. Special attention is paid to detailing other elements of variable costs, such as the wages of auxiliary staff, unified social contribution (ESC), energy costs for computer equipment, costs for software products and cloud services, as well as compensation payments for the use of employees' own computer equipment under remote work conditions. It is substantiated that these compensations, tied to hours worked, are essentially variable depreciation costs.