Abstract:

Companies in the industrial sector face major challenges in identifying specific solutions that enable them to define strategies to continuously improve their cost management. This work, focusing on the year 2020 (first year of the COVID-19 pandemic), seeks to understand how Cost-Volume-Profit (CVP) analysis can be applied to support decision-making in an inflatables manufacturing company. The theoretical framework is based on management accounting practices, with an emphasis on CVP analysis. The method adopted is a case study, applied to a company that produces inflatables. Financial and operational data – such as costs, prices and volumes – were collected from documents in the internal information system. The quantitative data will be analyzed using Excel, while the qualitative data will be interpreted in light of the research question. The results show how the planning and control of expenses is carried out by the company under study and how CVP analysis can help in strategic decision-making, particularly in an abnormal cyclical period such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In terms of practical contributions, it was found that managers were able to perceive easily correctable errors and possibilities for business improvements, based on the information generated by the CVP analysis, even though this was a very atypical period. In terms of theoretical contributions, the impact of the pandemic context has led to discussion in the academic community which has not called into question the usefulness of this analysis.