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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FUNDAMENTALS OF COST ACCOUNTING
- Thayne 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_forwardJoseph 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_forwardCodeHead 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_forward
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