Concept explainers
Time-Driven ABC for an Administrative
The manager of the Personnel Department at City Enterprises has been reading about time-driven ABC and wants to apply it to her department. She has identified four basic activities her employees spend most of the their time on: Interviewing, Hiring, Assessment, and Separation Processing. The department employs five staff who perform these activities. The manager provides the following estimates for the amount of time it takes to complete each of these activities:
- Interviewing: 45 minutes.
- Hiring: 60 minutes.
- Assessment: 75 minutes.
- Separation Processing: 90 minutes.
Employees in Personnel work 35-hour weeks with four weeks for vacation. Of the 35 hours, five are reserved for administrative tasks, training, and so on. The costs of the Personnel Department, including any allocated costs from other staff functions, are $972,000. During the year, Personnel conducted 1,200 interviews, made 375 hires, made 3,000 assessments, and had 250 separations.
Required
- a. What is the cost per minute for activities in Personnel?
- b. What is the cost of interviewing and hiring one employee?
- c. How many minutes of unused capacity did Personnel have for the year?
- d. What was the cost of the unused capacity in Personnel?
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- Joseph Fox, controller of Thorpe Company, has been in charge of a project to install an activity-based cost management system. This new system is designed to support the companys efforts to become more competitive. For the past six weeks, he and the project committee members have been identifying and defining activities, associating workers with activities, and assessing the time and resources consumed by individual activities. Now, he and the project committee are focusing on three additional implementation issues: (1) identifying activity drivers, (2) assessing value content, and (3) identifying cost drivers (root causes). Joseph has assigned a committee member the responsibilities of assessing the value content of five activities, choosing a suitable activity driver for each activity, and identifying the possible root causes of the activities. Following are the five activities with possible activity drivers: The committee member ran a regression analysis for each potential activity driver, using the method of least squares to estimate the variable and fixed cost components. In all five cases, costs were highly correlated with the potential drivers. Thus, all drivers appeared to be good candidates for assigning costs to products. The company plans to reward production managers for reducing product costs. Required: 1. What is the difference between an activity driver and a cost driver? In answering the question, describe the purpose of each type of driver. 2. For each activity, assess the value content and classify each activity as value-added or non-value-added (justify the classification). Identify some possible root causes of each activity, and describe how this knowledge can be used to improve activity performance. For purposes of discussion, assume that the value-added activities are not performed with perfect efficiency. 3. Describe the behavior that each activity driver will encourage, and evaluate the suitability of that behavior for the companys objective of becoming more competitive.arrow_forwardTypes of Responsibility Centers Consider each of the following independent scenarios: a. Terrin Belson, plant manager for the laser printer factory of Compugear Inc., brushed his hair back and sighed. December had been a bad month. Two machines had broken down, and some factory production workers (all on salary) were idled for part of the month. Materials prices increased, and insurance premiums on the factory increased. No way out of it; costs were going up. He hoped that the marketing vice president would be able to push through some price increases, but that really wasnt his department. b. Joanna Pauly was delighted to see that her ROI figures had increased for the third straight year. She was sure that her campaign to lower costs and use machinery more efficiently (enabling her factories to sell several older machines) was the reason why. Joanna planned to take full credit for the improvements at her semiannual performance review. c. Gil Rodriguez, sales manager for ComputerWorks, was not pleased with a memo from headquarters detailing the recent cost increases for the laser printer line. Headquarters suggested raising prices. Great, thought Gil, an increase in price will kill sales and revenue will go down. Why cant the plant shape up and cut costs like every other company in America is doing? Why turn this into my problem? d. Susan Whitehorse looked at the quarterly profit and loss statement with disgust. Revenue was down, and cost was upwhat a combination! Then she had an idea. If she cut back on maintenance of equipment and let a product engineer go, expenses would decreaseperhaps enough to reverse the trend in income. e. Shonna Lowry had just been hired to improve the fortunes of the Southern Division of ABC Inc. She met with top staff and hammered out a 3-year plan to improve the situation. A centerpiece of the plan is the retiring of obsolete equipment and the purchasing of state-of-the-art, computer-assisted machinery. The new machinery would take time for the workers to learn to use, but once that was done, waste would be virtually eliminated. Required: For each of the above independent scenarios, indicate the type of responsibility center involved (cost, revenue, profit, or investment).arrow_forwardOverhead Rates, Unit Costs Folsom Company manufactures specialty tools to customer order. There are three producing departments. Departmental information on budgeted overhead and various activity measures for the coming year is as follows: Currently, overhead is applied on the basis of machine hours using a plantwide rate. However, Janine, the controller, has been wondering whether it might be worthwhile to use departmental overhead rates. She has analyzed the overhead costs and drivers for the various departments and decided that Welding and Finishing should base their overhead rates on machine hours and that Assembly should base its overhead rate on direct labor hours. Janine has been asked to prepare bids for two jobs with the following information: The typical bid price includes a 35% markup over full manufacturing cost. Round all overhead rates to the nearest cent. Round all bid prices to the nearest dollar. Required: 1. Calculate a plantwide rate for Folsom Company based on machine hours. What is the bid price of each job using this rate? 2. Calculate departmental overhead rates for the producing departments. What is the bid price of each job using these rates?arrow_forward
- CodeHead Software Inc. does software development. One important activity in software development is writing software code. The manager of the WordPro Development Team determined that the average software programmer could write 25 lines of code in an hour. The plan for the first week in May called for 4,650 lines of code to be written on the WordPro product. The WordPro Team has five programmers. Each programmer is hired from an employment firm that requires temporary employees to be hired for a minimum of a 40-hour week. Programmers are paid 32.00 per hour. The manager offered a bonus if the team could generate more lines for the week, without overtime. Due to a project emergency, the programmers wrote more code in the first week of May than planned. The actual amount of code written in the first week of May was 5,650 lines, without overtime. As a result, the bonus caused the average programmers hourly rate to increase to 40.00 per hour during the first week in May. Instructions 1. If the team generated 4,650 lines of code according to the original plan, what would have been the labor time variance? 2. What was the actual labor time variance as a result of generating 5,650 lines of code? 3. What was the labor rate variance as a result of the bonus? 4. The manager is trying to determine if a better decision would have been to hire a temporary programmer to meet the higher programming demand in the first week of May, rather than paying out the bonus. If another employee was hired from the employment firm, what would have been the labor time variance in the first week? 5. Which decision is better, paying the bonus or hiring another programmer?arrow_forwardA manufacturing company has two service and two production departments. Human Resources and Machine Repair are the service departments. The production departments are Grinding and Polishing. The following data have been estimated for next years operations: The direct charges identified with each of the departments are as follows: The human resources department services all departments of the company, and its costs are allocated using the numbers of employees within each department, while machine repair costs are allocable to Grinding and Polishing on the basis of machine hours. 1. Distribute the service department costs, using the direct method. 2. Distribute the service department costs, using the sequential distribution method, with the department servicing the greatest number of other departments distributed first.arrow_forwardIndicate whether the statement describes reporting by the financial accounting function or the managerial accounting function of an organization. The users of the report are managers who need a daily summary of work done each shift. The report is a job cost sheet for jobs completed in a 24-hour period. The annual report is released each year on the companys website. The report is audited by the companys certified public accountant firm. The report is prepared every day because the customer service manager needs information about inventory ready to be shipped to customers.arrow_forward
- Calen Company manufactures and sells three products in a factory of three departments. Both labor and machine time are applied to the products as they pass through each department. The nature of the machine processing and of the labor skills required in each department is such that neither machines nor labor can be switched from one department to another. Calens management is attempting to plan its production schedule for the next several months. The planning is complicated by the fact that labor shortages exist in the community and some machines will be down several months for repairs. Following is information regarding available machine and labor time by department and the machine hours and direct labor hours required per unit of product. These data should be valid for at least the next six months. Calen believes that the monthly demand for the next six months will be as follows: Inventory levels will not be increased or decreased during the next six months. The unit cost and price data for each product are as follows: Required: 1. Calculate the monthly requirement for machine hours and direct labor hours for producing Products 401, 402, and 403 to determine whether or not the factory can meet the monthly sales demand. 2. Determine the quantities of 401, 402, and 403 that should be produced monthly to maximize profits. Prepare a schedule that shows the contribution to profits of your product mix. 3. Assume that the machine hours available in Department 3 are 1,500 instead of 2,700. Calculate the optimal monthly product mix using the graphing approach to linear programming. Prepare a schedule that shows the contribution to profits from this optimal mix. (CMA adapted)arrow_forwardBig Mikes, a large hardware store, has gathered data on its overhead activities and associated costs for the past 10 months. Nizam Sanjay, a member of the controllers department, believes that overhead activities and costs should be classified into groups that have the same driver. He has decided that unloading incoming goods, counting goods, and inspecting goods can be grouped together as a more general receiving activity, since these three activities are all driven by the number of receiving orders. The 10 months of data shown below have been gathered for the receiving activity. Required: 1. Prepare a scattergraph, plotting the receiving costs against the number of purchase orders. Use the vertical axis for costs and the horizontal axis for orders. 2. Select two points that make the best fit, and compute a cost formula for receiving costs. 3. Using the high-low method, prepare a cost formula for the receiving activity. 4. Using the method of least squares, prepare a cost formula for the receiving activity. What is the coefficient of determination?arrow_forwardCorazon Manufacturing Company has a purchasing department staffed by five purchasing agents. Each agent is paid 28,000 per year and is able to process 4,000 purchase orders. Last year, 17,800 purchase orders were processed by the five agents. Required: 1. Calculate the activity rate per purchase order. 2. Calculate, in terms of purchase orders, the: a. total activity availability b. unused capacity 3. Calculate the dollar cost of: a. total activity availability b. unused capacity 4. Express total activity availability in terms of activity capacity used and unused capacity. 5. What if one of the purchasing agents agreed to work half time for 14,000? How many purchase orders could be processed by four and a half purchasing agents? What would unused capacity be in purchase orders?arrow_forward
- Communications Jamarcus Bradshaw, plant manager of Georgia Paper Companys papermaking mill, was looking over the cost of production reports for July and August for the Papermaking Department. The reports revealed the following: Jamarcus was concerned about the increased cost per ton from the output of the department. As a result, he asked the plant controller to perform a study to help explain these results. The controller, Leann Brunswick, began the analysis by performing some interviews of key plant personnel in order to understand what the problem might be. Excerpts from an interview with Len Tyson, a paper machine operator, follow: Len: We have two papermaking machines in the department. I have no data, but I think paper machine No. 1 is applying too much pulp and, thus, is wasting both conversion and materials resources. We haven't had repairs on paper machine No. 1 in a while. Maybe this is the problem. Leann: How does too much pulp result in wasted resources? Len: Well, you see, if too much pulp is applied, then we will waste pulp material. The customer will not pay for the extra product; we just use more material to make the product. Also, when there is too much pulp, the machine must be slowed down in order to complete the drying process. This results in additional conversion costs. Leann: Do you have any other suspicions? Len: Well, as you know, we have two productsgreen paper and yellow paper. They are identical except for the color. The color is added to the papermaking process in the paper machine. I think that during August these two color papers have been behaving very differently. I don't have any data, but it just seems as though the amount of waste associated with the green paper has increased. Leann: Why is this? Len: I understand that there has been a change in specifications for the green paper, starting near the beginning of August. This change could be causing the machines to run poorly when making green paper. If this is the case, the cost per ton would increase for green paper. Leann also asked for a database printout providing greater detail on Augusts operating results. September 9 Requested by: Leann Brunswick Papermaking DepartmentAugust detail Prior to preparing a report, Leann resigned from Georgia Paper Company to start her own business. You have been asked to take the data that Leann collected, and write a memo to Jamarcus Bradshaw with a recommendation to management. Your memo should include analysis of the August data to determine whether the paper machine or the paper color explains the increase in the unit cost from July. Include any supporting schedules that are appropriate. Round any calculations to the nearest cent.arrow_forwardThayne Company has 30 clerks that work in its Accounts Payable Department. A study revealed the following activities and the relative time demanded by each activity: Required: Classify the four activities as value-added or non-value-added, and calculate the clerical cost of each activity. For non-value-added activities, indicate why they are non-value-added.arrow_forwardRefer to the data in Exercise 7.18. When the capacity of the HR Department was originally established, the normal usage expected for each department was 20,000 direct labor hours. This usage is also the amount of activity planned for the two departments in Year 1 and Year 2. Required: 1. Allocate the costs of the HR Department using the direct method and assuming that the purpose is product costing. 2. Allocate the costs of the HR Department using the direct method and assuming that the purpose is to evaluate performance.arrow_forward
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