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but does not focus on environmental impact as such. To arrive at a practical solution to the implementation of ECA in a pany’s existing accounting system, and to ply with the problem of distinguishing between moary and physical aspects, an integrated concept is required. As physical information is often the basis for the moary information (. kilograms of a raw material are the basis for the moary valuation of raw material consumption), the integration 2 of this information into the accounting system database is essential. From there, the generation of physical environmental and moary (environmental) information would in many cases be feasible. For many panies, the priority would be moary (environmental) information for use in for instance decisions regarding resource consumptions and investments. The use of ECA in small and mediumsized enterprises (SME) is still relatively rare, so practical examples available in the literature are few and far between. One problem is that the definitions of SMEs vary between countries (see Kosmider, 1993 and Reinemann, 1999). In our work the criteria shown in Table 1 are used to describe small and mediumsized enterprises. Table 1. Criteria of small and mediumsized enterprises Number of employees Turnover Up to 500 employees Turnover up to EUR 50m Management Organization Ownercumentrepreneur Divisional organization is rare Varies from a patriarchal management Short flow of information style in traditional panies and teamwork Strong personal mitment in startup panies Instruction and controlling with Topdown planning in old panies direct personal contact Delegation is rare Low level of formality High flexibility Finance Personnel family pany easy to survey number of employees limited possibilities of financing wide expertise high satisfaction of employees Supply chain Innovation closely involved in local high potential of innovation economic cycles in special fields intense relationship with customers and suppliers 3 Keeping these characteristics in mind, the chosen ECA approach should be easy to apply, should facilitate the handling of plex structures and at the same time be suited to the special needs of SMEs. Despite their size SMEs are increasingly implementing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems like SAP R/3, Oracle and Peoplesoft. ERP systems support business processes across organizational, temporal and geographical boundaries using one integrated database. The primary use of ERP systems is for planning and controlling production and administration processes of an enterprise. In SMEs however, they are often individually designed and thus not standardized making the integration of for instance software that supports ECA implementation problematic. Examples could be tools like the “ecoefficiency” approach of IMU (2020) or Umberto (2020) because these solutions work with the database of more prehensive software solutions like SAP, Oracle, Navision or others. Umberto software for example (see Umberto, 2020) would require large investments and great background knowledge of ECA – which is not available in most SMEs. The ECA