Accounting Case Essay

Assuming that the company’s goal is to maximize profits, the current cost system is not an appropriate tool for strategic planning. The ambiguity of the overhead costs per product makes it difficult to accurately analyze the cause and effect relationships of changes and/or improvements to specific product line.

In using the ABC system, Valves and Pumps are matching the company’s target of 35% of gross margin apart from Flow Controllers. With the use of TAC, the gross margin on pump sales is 19.5% that well below the company's target gross margin of 35%. This indicates that the current overhead cost allocation practice did not reflect the real costs incurred on the products. The lower actual gross profit obtained was mainly due to wrong cost allocation on the pump product.

1. State the business case for option #3, the PCB In-sourcing proposal. What is the benefit? What is the risk? How do you compare this proposal to option #1 and #2?

Overhead costs are not in proportion to the production output because of the method they are using. This leads to inaccurate pricing and costing decisions. An Activity Based Costing System would help find the real relationship between the products produced and overhead.

* The variances are due to the Mile High Cycle company not forecasting for increased production. The company budgeted for the production of 10,000 cycles but the actual production was 10,800 units. When the company increased production, the production efficiency decreased. The company had to use or rework parts that added extra cost to the expenses; the reworked parts added $25,000 of extra expenses to the wheel assembly production and $45,000 to the final assembly process. The material,

3. Briefly describe how the current production cost assignment system works. What are the consumption ratios (activity percentages) for assigning manufacturing overhead to each product at present?

According to the fact of this case, Parent Co. (Parent) wholly owns Poor Son Co. (Poor Son) as a legal subsidiary, and both of them all nonpublic companies. However, in January 2007 Poor Son filed a voluntary bankruptcy under Chapter 11 of the U.S. bankruptcy code because of its inability of meet obligations as they became due. Then, Parent claimed the loss of control of Poor Son and deconsolidated Poor Son from its financial statement. Through the bidding process in May 2009, Poor Son and OtherCo, the winning sponsor, filed a joint plan of reorganization to the bankruptcy court, but the plan was rescinded by OtherCo later due to significant market value shrink of Poor Son. After that, the

The Ilarion Manufacturing Company operates a job-order costing system and applies overhead cost to jobs on the basis of direct labor cost. Its predetermined overhead rate was based on a cost formula that estimated $117,000 of manufacturing overhead for an estimated allocation base of $90,000 direct labor dollars. The company has provided the following data in the form of an Excel worksheet:

In my opinion, the four criteria, quality, customer service, technical capability, and competitive cost position, are very appropriate to classify its products because this company considered most all of aspect of products to catalog and classify and this way can help this company to find out which type product should use which method to reduce its costs.

Due to the information, 20 acres of land equal 80 sheep according to the exchange rate of last year, a one-room cabin equal 3 acres of land and equal 12 sheep finally, a plow equals 2 goat and equal 2/3 sheep according to last year’s exchange rate and 2 carts which were traded with a poor acre of land equals 8 sheep plus 400 sheep. So Deyonne’s total assets are 500(2/3) sheep. Deyonne’s liabilities and assets deduction are 35 sheep plus 3 sheep, which will come to 38 sheep,

3.) The estimated product costs for valves, pumps, and flow controllers using ABC for overhead activities (primarily Ex. 1 & 4) and direct cost data from the Exhibits are:

1. Use the Overhead Cost Activity Analysis in Exhibit 5 and other data on manufacturing

2. Analyze ECCO’s global value chain. How well does this configuration match the drivers in the industry?

The overhead spending is greater than the direct labour costs or the direct material costs for all three product lines- Valves, Pumps and Flow Controllers (Exhibit 2). Overheads are simply charged at 185% constant for three diverse products. The fact that there is huge variance in the number of units produced per production run- it is 375 for valves and 18 for flow controllers per production run. This shows the reason for high overheads cost too. Hence it calls for checking the cost allocation system of the company.

During the 1980s the limitations of traditional product costing systems began to be widely publicised. These systems were designed decades ago when most companies manufactured a narrow range of products, and direct labour and materials were the dominant factory costs. Overhead costs were relatively small, and the distortions arising from inappropriate overhead allocations were not significant. Information processing costs were high, and it was therefore difficult to justify more sophisticated overhead allocation methods.