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A conceptual framework is intended to ensure the coherence of tools used to deal with a question. This coherence is structured by principles and generally materializes through a model that allows the relationship between the concepts mobilized to emerge. This framework has been used in financial accounting to deal with the globalization of trade and the internationalization of corporate groups, and is at the root of international standards. However, in the field of management accounting and especially of costing systems, the need for such clarification emerged only very recently and for a different reason. Here, the aim is not to develop a standard for costing practices but to offer practitioners (management controllers and decision-makers) and teachers the necessary framework to decode the abundant offer that has developed since the 1980s. In this article we compare research carried out in the United States in a professional and institutional environment with academic studies done in France.