Auerbach Enterprises Manufacturers

The current cost system allocates overhead costs once a year, as a function of direct labor dollars. This allocation strategy results in:

A2 Auto Corporation is one of the world’s largest manufacturers and distributors of automobiles and automobile ancillary parts. In its Form 10-K, filed with the SEC, the following information was disclosed.

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.

|2.45   |Controllability and relevance (LO1). Rams Ramachandran is considering the wisdom of reducing the number of suppliers |

Brewer, C. P., Garrison, H., R., & Noreen, W., E., (2005). Introduction to Managerial Accounting, 2nd Edition. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

“Auerbach Enterprises uses machine hours as the cost driver to assign overhead costs to the air conditioners. The company has used a company-wide predetermined overhead rate in past years, but the new controller, Bennie Leon, is considering the use of departmental overhead rates beginning with the next year. “(Schneider, 2012). One product is affected more than the other by use of departmental rates rather than companywide rate.

Abby could allocate indirect costs to special orders using a company-wide overhead rate. Frequently, these indirect costs are allocated by selecting an allocation base common to all of the company’s products or services. Many companies base overhead allocations on direct labor-hours

Overhead costs include rent, office staff, depreciation, and other. Once the flexible budget was complete, variances between the actual and flexible budget could be calculated (Exhibit B). The variance for frame assembly was favorable with actual costs being $82,663 less than in the flexible budget. The variances for wheel and final assembly however were both unfavorable. Wheel assembly had an unfavorable variance of $50,650, while final assembly variance was the highest at an unfavorable variance of $231,200. Taking into account these three aspects of direct cost, direct cost has an unfavorable variance $199,187. Although most overhead costs are fixed, 2/3 of other costs are variable and increase with the increased production. As shown in Exhibit B, overhead variance is unfavorable at $60,000. The direct cost variance and overhead variable together lead to a total unfavorable variance of $259,187.

3. Under the new activity-based costing (ABC) system, compute the indirect cost allocation rates for each of the three activities:

Allocating overhead costs is one of the important tasks and is necessary to be done by management accountant. One key reason is that in term of pricing strategies, many firms decide their products’ selling price based on their cost. And the selling price has to cover all the costs and profit.

The case seeks to assist Zauner’s comptroller, Yu Chia-yi, in determining the best costing method for their overhead costs, in addition to

Bhimani, A., Horngren, C., Datar, S., Rajan, M. et al. (2012) Management and Cost Accounting. 5th ed. Edinburgh: Prentice Hall, p.369 - 378.

The above graph suggests that volume based computation of overhead costs does not reflect the real overhead costs based on actual production per product line (computed maximum in excess over actual). On the other hand, if we follow the allocation of overhead costs based on prime costs as illustrated in Exhibit 2 of the case, we need to consider other quantitative factors: 1. No data is available to determine the amount of raw materials used in producing each of the products. While we can assume that the production of small, colored glass ornaments uses fewer raw materials (e.g. glass) than large, colored glass ornaments, the amount of glass used to produce specialty ornaments cannot be derived from the facts of the case. 2. There is also no data available to determine the number of direct labor hours consumed for producing each product type, although evidently, specialty ornaments use more direct labor hours. Based on the above considerations, we deem it inaccurate to base overhead on prime costs, a common practice in traditional costing. In addition,

Overheads were first segregated into certain categories like Direct Indirect etc. The reason for this were different costs and different activity on which they are based. Then the time taken for each activity was computed and the costs were allocated based on that.

Abstract: This paper investigates whether cost stickiness occurs in small and medium sized companies using a sample of Italian non-listed and listed firms during the period 1999-2008. Our findings show that cost stickiness emerges only for the total cost of labor and not for the selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) costs, the cost of goods sold and the operating costs. Stickiness of the operating costs is only detected in the sample of listed companies. We further contribute to the literature on sticky cost behavior by discussing critical issues