Wilkerson Company

Activity-based costing can be defined as the managers allocate costs depending on the quantity of resources a product or service consumed in the manufacture of goods and services. The activity based

Activity-based costing is a system of accounting that puts emphases on activities performed to produce products or services (Schneider, 2012). In this costing system every activity is assigned a cost (Schneider, 2012). The goal of activity-based costing is not to allot common costs to products but to measure and then price out all the resources used for activities that sustain the production and delivery of products and services to customers (Mazumder, 2007). Activity-based costing is a cost system that is useful in business because of the fact that it does account for the cost of the products, resources used to produce the product and delivery of the product.

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

Activity-based costing (ABC) methodology is an instrument designed to provide accountants and managers with valuable costing information that will allow them to make sound strategic decisions. It is used as a secondary methodology rather than a replacement for the company’s primarily costing system. The ABC methodology identifies activities in an organization and for each activity it assigns a cost. The cost reflects the actual resource consumption by each activity that has been identified.

Absorption costing is used for all outside reports. All non-direct fixed costs are allocated using various allocation bases as indicated throughout the project. The Company does not use a full ABC costing system; however, it does employee some of the ABC concepts in the budgeting process.

The advantages are that it provides a broad coverage and it comes with a low cost to the company.

Wilkerson’s existing cost system is based on traditional cost system, where all the manufacturing overhead is expressed as a percentage of the direct labor.

In using ABC overhead costs are distributed differently across the three products, but in total they are the same, in total. However, ABC changes the information that managers receive to make effective business decisions, which will ultimately result in improved business results.

Q3. How were the limitations of the existing cost system overcome by the ABC Cost System? What are the implications of the ABC system?

Data must be collected, verified and entered into the system. ABC does not conform to GAAP so a company will need two accounting books, one for internal and one for external. The data can be very easily misinterpreted, decision making entails identifying which costing data is relevant for decisions on hand.

Activity-based-costing (ABC) system find activities as the drive for each cost, calculate the average cost per driver’s activity, and times budgeted activities for budgeted cost. It is worth mentioning that ABC system is not used to find problems in cost records, or predict future cost based on that.

Q3. How were the limitations of the existing cost system overcome by the ABC Cost System? What are the implications of the ABC system?

Costing system is the most important part for any business or engineering company. Cost accounting is necessary for a company to be able to exercise control over the actual costs incurred compared with planned expenditure. From the point of view of cost control, a costing system should not only be able to identify any costs that are running out of control but should also provide a tool that can assist in determining the action that is required to doing right things.

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

ABC refers to cost attribution to cost units on the basis of benefit received from indirect activities e.g. material ordering, material handling, machine setups, quality assuring, customer support services etc. For each such activity, it is necessary to identify a cost driver that causes incurrence of cost relating to that activity. For example, hours spent on testing for a quality assurance activity may be used as application base of cost driver for this activity.