I. Introduction
The aim of this essay is to explain the purposes of full absorption product costs which are categorized into traditional method and Activity-Based-Costing (ABC) system; to examine the benefit of ABC system that outweigh traditional method; to analyse the survey finding that only about 15 per cent of companies surveyed use ABC system; and to justify why ABC system has been found to be more useful in financial and service organisations. The essay is divided into five main parts. First, the purposes of calculating full absorption product costs will be explained. Second, a comparison between traditional method and ABC system will be drawn to find out that the ABC system is considered more useful than the traditional method.
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Traditional method tends to use arbitrary allocations that are not significant determinants of the costs. On the contrary, ABC mainly uses cause-and-effect allocations as significant determinants of the costs and refrains from arbitrary allocations. Therefore, cause-and-effect allocations should be used to get accurate assignment of indirect costs to cost objects. Figure 1 below describes the different types of product costing systems.
Figure 1: Types of Product Costing System Management accounting textbooks (Kaplan and Atkinson, 1989; Drury, 1992) explained that there are two purposes of product costs: first, for financial accounting by calculating the manufacturing costs incurred during a period between costs of goods sold and inventories; second, for managerial decision-making requirements by providing useful information.
For decision-making purposes, product cost information is one of the most important inputs for pricing decisions or product-mix decisions. Organisations that sell highly customized or differentiated products or services, or who lead the market, have some choice in setting their selling prices. The pricing decisions can be influenced by the cost of the product. Other organisations have their selling prices set up by the market as they only have little or no power over the selling prices of their products. However, cost information is still considerably important for
With the use of Traditional Absorption Costing (TAC) which means Wilkerson Company is now only put the costing of direct labor and material in place. As we can
While we are performing our analysis on different aspects of the company, we look at the three main types of cost. When we remain devoted to improving our costs, and the faults related, we show our same devotion to our consumers. This is portrayed by the quality of products we put on the shelves. Prevention costs, appraisal costs and Failure costs are areas
Under an ABC system, the allocation of costs to products is achieved through at least four analytical steps. Firstly, costs are grouped into activity levels. Secondly, cost drivers are
According to Investopedia, “Full costing is an accounting method used to determine the complete end-to-end cost of producing products or services.” Full costing is also called "full costs" or "absorption costing."
Businesses – from manufacturing, merchandising and service industries alike – take careful considerations for their costing systems. Setting-up competitive prices in the market can be a result of proper costing methods. Misallocation of costs may lead to incorrect price estimates, continuous production of unprofitable products, and ineffective processing schedules. In this case study, we will discuss the costing methods Zauner Ornaments are currently using and upon conclusion, it will enable us to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of each costing method.
INTRODUCTION Businesses – from manufacturing, merchandising and service industries alike – take careful consideration in the analysis of their costing systems in order to be able to set up competitive prices in the market. Misallocation of costs may lead to incorrect price estimates, continuous production of unprofitable products, and ineffective processing schedules. In this case study, we will discuss the costing methods which Zauner Ornaments have used or is currently using and, in conclusion, be able to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of each costing method. CASE CONTEXT The case seeks to assist Zauner’s comptroller, Yu Chia-yi, in determining the best costing method for their overhead costs. In addition we also aim to
It consists of weighting and combining the weights of the ten factors and to evaluate implementing ABC. The potential benefits of ABC can be analyzed in advance along two separate dimensions. And there are ten mediating factors (Pricing Diversity, Support Diversity, Common Processes, Cost Allocation, Growth of Indirect Costs, Pricing Freedom, Fixed Expense Ratio, Strategic Considerations, Cost Reduction Effort, Analysis Frequency) can guide management in determining the answers. The fist five factors (PD, SD, CP, CA, FG) based on the probability. The second dimension of the model seeks to establish decisions. lY axis potential for ABC due to cost distortion---PD.SD.CP.CA.FG lX axis proclivity to use cost information in decision---PF.FE.SC.CR.AF To start management must analyze and responses to two key questions: 1. For a given organization, is it likely that ABC will produce costs that are significantly different from those that are generated with conventional accounting, and does it seem likely that those costs will be "better"? 2. If information that is considered "better" is generated by the system, will the new information change the dependent decisions made by the management? After finish these questions managers of company can discuses the ten factors that support or reject implementation. Finally, the combined weighted scores are plotted as a point on one of the four quadrants of a graph.Plotting the Answers--- Use Contingency Grid Method The steps in the
The costing technique followed by the Coca-cola Company is Process Costing which is one of the forms of Absorption Costing.
The purpose of this paper is to answer a few important questions: Why do companies allocate costs? How do companies allocate costs? And how this cost allocation can affect the decision making of the company. It is important for the companies to find the proper method to allocate the costs. Cost allocation is an important issue in many companies because many of the costs associated with designing, producing and distributing products and services are not easily identified with the products and services that are created. It would have been easier for companies to allocate cost if costs were directly traceable with the products and the cost allocation would have been minor issue for the company. The decision-making
The strategy for setting a product’s price often has to be changed when the product is part of a product mix. In this case, the firm looks for a set of prices that maximizes its profits on the total product mix. Pricing is difficult because the various products have related demand and costs and face different degrees of competition.
This method did not account for any specific cost arising from the complexity, diversity or other production related specifics of the product line. In contrary, the time-driven ABC approach does account for all the nuances of each product line. From the table can also be inferred that the practical capacity is not totally used since at the end there is a total of $28,288 of unused resources. Table 3 summarizes the capacity utilization of various resources.
Managers are faced with making pricing decisions every day. They are responsible for coming up with how much to charge for a product or service. This amount depends on a multitude of factors such as competition, cost, advertising, and sales promotion. The best price for a product or service is the one that maximizes the difference between total revenue and total costs. However, in reality, the price charged is usually some form of cost-plus, which is later adjusted for market conditions and competition. Some of the different pricing decision methods are cost plus pricing, target costing, and activity based pricing.
1a) Activity based costing is a relatively new type of procedure that can be used as an inventory valuation method. The technique was developed to provide more accurate product costs. This improved accuracy is accomplished by tracing costs to products through activities. In other words, costs are traced to activities (activity costing) and then these costs are traced, in a second stage, to the products that use the activities. Another way to express the idea is to say that activities consume resources and products consume activities. Essentially, an attempt is made to treat all costs as variable, recognizing that all costs vary with something, whether it is production volume or some non-production volume related phenomenon. Both
After analyzing the costs function wise the firm should analyze the costs by each marketing entity – each product, each territory etc. For this purpose, the firm must put in place an accounting system that facilitates the assignment of functional expenses to the various entities like products, markets and customers.
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.