This guideline is an industry-specific addendum to AACE International’s generic guideline for project code of accounts (Recommended Practice No. 20R-98). This document describes recommended practices for codes of accounts (COA) as applied to engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) projects in the process industries. “Process industries” are those with facilities whose main function is to perform a process. This includes chemical, petrochemical, hydrocarbon, pulp and paper, pharmaceutical, power generation, thermal, metallurgical, assembly, fabrication, and other processing. The primary characteristic of these industries, as it relates to codes of accounts, is that process or manufacturing equipment is the core or primary physical component of the facility. Equipment differentiates these projects from commercial construction and infrastructure where the core component is a structure, from software development projects where the core component is programming code, and so on.
COAs are applicable to all phases of the asset life cycle, but this guideline specifically addresses the EPC for creation, modification, or termination of a process facility. This guideline does not apply to code of accounts to support ongoing operations of process facilities. Properly defining a work breakdown structure (WBS), and other project structures, and deciding how they should be structured are outside the scope of this document.

A project code of accounts is a coded index of project cost, resource, and activity categories. A complete COA includes definitions of the content of each account code and is methodically structured to facilitate finding, sorting, compiling, summarizing, defining and otherwise managing the project information that is linked to the code. The information is used to support total cost management practices such as cost estimating, cost reporting, cost accounting, planning, and scheduling. Refer to 20R-98 for a more complete description of the principles of COAs.