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Activity Based Costing Vs Traditional Steps, Results Compared

The touring bicycles product line is a high-volume line, while the mountain bicycle is a low-volume, specialized product. Step 1- Establishing Cost Pool for each activity based on the Beverages dynamics. To explore further we should analyze – Return on Sales per unit. Coca-Cola markets two types of products in the Beverages industry. For sake of simplicity let us call them Consumer/Non-Cyclical Standard product and Consumer/Non-Cyclical Custom Product.

Kaplan and Cooper of Harvard Business School, who have developed this new approach in costing to calculate product costs, claim that the costs should be classified as long-term variable costs and short-term variable costs. Traditionally short-term variable costs are known as variable online bookkeeping costs and long-term are known as fixed costs. Costing systems which absorb overheads on a direct labour basis are, therefore, not relevant in an AMT environment. The basic idea of ABC is that costs are grouped according to what drives them or causes them to be incurred.

This lump of unallocated overhead costs must nevertheless be met by contributions from each of the products, but it is not as large as the overhead costs before ABC is employed. Under activity-based costing, it would then attempt to assign a proportion of that $20,000 to each unit it produces. Activity-based costing first determines the purpose and cost of each activity performed by a company and then assigns a proportionate cost to every individual unit produced based on its consumption of those activities. Facility support activities are necessary for development and production to take place. These costs are administrative in nature and include building depreciation, property taxes, plant security, insurance, accounting, outside landscape and maintenance, and plant management’s and support staff’s salaries. The number of activities a company has may be small, say five or six, or number in the hundreds. Assume Lady Trekkers, Inc., has identified its activity cost pools and cost drivers .

Optimizing Cost Accounting Starts At The Service

Instead, it put employees through a three-month, intensive, on-the-job training program—an approach that makes sense for many smaller companies. After the first-day fiasco at New Castle, Chaika realized that he could not impose ABC on a plant. Every aspect—from collecting the data, to designing the system, to training the workforce to interpret and use the data—had to be done in partnership with the plant’s management. So, at New Castle and later at other plants, the implementation team first spent two days explaining to the plant’s managers all the steps involved in installing ABC, emphasizing that the process would be a joint effort. The team also stressed that the main reason for installing ABC was to help managers expand the business, not shrink it, and it pointed to how ABC had led to hiring, not firing, at the first plants. The courses in the first group, which introduce the basic concepts of ABC, are for employees at a wide range of levels—from top management down to some hourly workers.

Safety-Kleen also has adopted ABC-based performance measures, which involved a fundamental rethinking of the old system. As Safety-Kleen rolled out ABC, its top-level managers realized that some of the old performance measures were not motivating plant managers to make decisions that were best for the company as a whole. For example, plant managers were still rewarded based on how they performed against an operating budget set at the beginning of each year, which did not take into account processing efficiency or unit costs. The measures were changed to reward managers for reducing the unit costs of the materials processed at their plants.

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Activity-based costing is an accounting approach that enables Toyota Motor to assign overhead activities costs of the firm to the specific products and services it produces & delivers. The activity-based costing method doesn’t require much understanding to be implemented. This is because it focuses only on the reality on how to undertake the process. For this reason, it will only depend on the type of business aiming to consider activity-based costing. This method will allow business institutions to gain an accurate costing of services and products. As it will focus on costing of services and products, it should be done with accuracy as the whole process has been monitored. Therefore, it will allow a company to know the cost which should be friendly for both the consumer and manufacturer.

• Instead of treating all indirect costs as one organization wide pool, ABC pools the costs based on each activity.
• One is the proper utilization of unit cost compared to its total cost.
• Use activity drivers to apportion the costs in the secondary cost pools to the primary cost pools.
• Accordingly, this is arguably the best method in order to gain accurate estimates to the cost that should be incurred.
• ABC is designed to track the cost of activities, so you can use it to see if activity costs are in line with industry standards.

ABC works best in complex environments, where there are many machines and products, and tangled processes that are not easy to sort out. Conversely, it is of less use in a streamlined environment where production processes are abbreviated.

These individual activities are grouped together with similar processes into a cost pool that relates to singleactivity cost driver. Since allocation of indirect costs to various products or departments on a reasonable basis is a complicated job, activity based costing technique helps a cost accountant to find out product cost to a greater accuracy. Accountants estimated the overhead and the volume of events for each activity. For example, management estimated the company would purchase 100,000 pieces of materials that would require overhead costs of $200,000 for the year. These overhead costs included salaries of people to purchase, inspect, and store materials. Setting up machines for a new product would need 400 setups and overhead of $800,000.

During the process of implementing an activity based costing method in a business, all of the processes that are used are looked at in depth. After a short period of time, a bigger picture begins to emerge of which processes are working well and which are not. Robin Cooper and Robert S. Kaplan, proponents of the Balanced Scorecard, brought notice to these concepts in a number of articles published in Harvard Business Review beginning in 1988.

The entire rollout at a work site takes 6 to 15 months, depending on the size of the facility. First, activity based costing an advance group conducts 12 weeks of training to pave the way for the actual installation of ABC.

Traditional Vs Activity

The technique of ABC lays the importance of different costs for different purposes and the identification of just those costs, which are relevant to a particular decision. However, it does not challenge the conventional accounting methods and theory; instead, it refines the ideas and concepts of conventional methods. The assumptions underlying ABC is that virtually all of a company’s activities exist to support the production and delivery of goods and services.

The formula for activity-based costing is the cost pool total divided by cost driver, which yields the cost driver rate. The cost driver rate is used in activity-based costing to calculate the amount of overhead and indirect costs related to a particular activity. In using activity-based costing, the company identified four activities that were important cost drivers and a cost driver used to allocate overhead.

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Also complicating healthcare’s financial future is the emergence of large insurers. These initiatives aim to decrease the traditional fee-for-service volume that has driven provider growth and expansion over the years. Product level activities include keeping activities up to date, advertising of a product, etc. The manufacturing support activities such as ordering materials and its inspection constitute the batch level activities. The cost of the basic materials required is based on the volume of the output to be delivered. Activity-based costing provides comparative standards to perform benchmarking and reengineering.

Emphasis on resources whose consumption varies significantly by product and product type-look for diversity. Read this article to learn about the need, concept, approaches, characteristics, key areas of bookkeeping development, allocation of overheads, steps to develop, implementation and suitability of Activity Based Costing. These estimates were made last year and will be used during all of the current year.

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In ABC system a cost center is established for each cost driver and identification, measurement and control of cost drivers is essential in ABC. ABC is the planned and systematic study and determination of cost of each of the branches of business activities that add to the value of product and services. A cost driver is a structural determinant of cost related activity. The logic behind is that cost drivers dictate the cost behaviour pattern. In tracing overhead cost to product, a cost behaviour pattern must be understood so that appropriate cost driver could be identified.

First, it will expand the number of cost pools, which can later be used to assign those overhead costs. So, it pools costs by activity instead of accumulating these costs in one organization-wide pool. Second, instead of on volume measures like direct labor costs or machine hours, it will create new bases to assign these overhead costs to items upon these activities, which shall generate costs. Mamata Inc., a manufacturing company of drugs, is considering switching from their traditional method of cost to a newly implemented system by their production head. It is activity-based costing so that the two products Z serum and W serum can be sold at their proper cost and make them price competitive in the market. The traditional approach usually uses a few pools of indirect costs, so cost allocations are of intently based on broad averages.

In ABC approach, the first step is to identify the activities for which costs are to be collected and controlled. The various activities may be identified as direct activities and indirect activities. Activity based costing is a new term developed for finding out the cost. The basic feature of ABC is its focus on activities as the fundamental cost objects. It uses activities as the basis for calculating the costs of products and services. Foster and Datar, “ABC is not an alternative costing system to job costing or process costing.

Activity-based costing records the costs that traditional cost accounting does not do. Like manufacturing industries, financial institutions have diverse products and customers, which can cause cross-product, cross-customer subsidies. Since personnel expenses represent the largest single component of non-interest expense in financial institutions, these costs must also be attributed more accurately to products and customers. Activity based costing, even though originally developed for manufacturing, may even be a more useful tool for doing this. CIMA, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, defines ABC as an approach to the costing and monitoring of activities which involves tracing resource consumption and costing final outputs. Resources are assigned to activities, and activities to cost objects based on consumption estimates. The latter utilize cost drivers to attach activity costs to outputs.

Author: Billie Anne Grigg