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The Traditional And Traditional Systems Of Costing Systems

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Costing systems are information systems that help companies determine the total production cost of the goods and services they produce over a period of time. There are two commonly used systems of costing companies apply to determine their total cost of production in relation to their revenue for a period. These are; the traditional or conventional system of costing, and activity-based costing (ABC). The method or system of costing to use depends on the needs of a company and its management decisions.
Traditional system of costing assigns manufacturing overhead based on the volume of a cost driver, such as the amount of direct labor hours needed to produce an item. A cost driver is a factor that causes cost to be incurred, such as machine hours, direct labor hours and direct material hours. According to the Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering (AACE) International, Activity based costing (ABC) ‘is a total quality management tool for cost and performance measurement of activities, resources and cost objects.’ …show more content…

This is because the introduction of new activities into the model would require re-estimating the amount of cost that should be assigned to the new activity, rather than assuming a constant cost per unit as applied in the traditional method.
Finally, Activity based costing does not align with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). Hence, results from this system can only be used for internal purposes only, and not for external financial reporting. However, a company is expected to provide reports to its externally stakeholders periodically. Reporting using ABC systems make it difficult for shareholders and other stakeholders to understand the results generated. As a result, management has to adopt the traditional method for external reporting in addition to the ABC systems, and this poses additional cost to

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