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Advantages And Disadvantages Of Unit Cost

Decent Essays

Critically evaluate the merits and limitations of unit cost information as a decision-making tool.
Introduction
Understanding how costs behave is vitally important when making production decisions, preparing budgets, and so on. A unit cost is the total expenditure incurred by a company to produce, store and sell one unit of a product or service. Unit costs include all fixed costs, or overhead costs, and all variable costs, or direct material costs and direct labour costs, involved in production.
Determining the unit cost is a quick way to check if companies are efficient in producing their products. The cost information system plays an important role in every organisation within the decision-making process. An important task of management is to ensure the control over operations, processes, activity sectors, and not ultimately on costs.

Merits of Unit Cost Information
It is extremely important for management to know the unit cost, but also the full breakdown of cost for each unit or service. There are many reasons for management to understand the unit cost.
For companies to be successful or to be competitive they need to always know how much it’s costing to produce a …show more content…

Often companies will minimise costs that will allow to sell with a low margin, but at more quantity and frequency, the best example of this would-be Ryanair. Ryanair has an excellent understanding of its unit costs and this has been a huge benefit in developing their business strategy. They looked at using secondary airports as an alternative to the major international airports as the offered cheaper terms and by eliminating offers of luggage transfers and connecting flights. These decisions came from investigating each cost and in turn allowed them to reduce their fares to a price that a lot of other airlines couldn’t and still can’t afford. These decisions drove passenger number from 6 million people in 1999 to 119 million in

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