Activity-Based Costing

AuthorMichael Luehlfing, Wendy Mason
Pages1-3

Page 1

To support compliance with financial reporting requirements, a company's traditional cost-accounting system is often articulated with its general ledger system. In essence, this linkage is grounded in cost allocation. Typically, costs are allocated for either valuation purposes (i.e., financial statements for external uses) or decision-making purposes (i.e., internal uses) or both. However, in certain instances costs also are allocated for cost-reimbursement purposes (e.g., hospitals and defense contractors).

The traditional approach to cost-allocation consists of three basic steps: accumulate costs within a production or nonproduction department; allocate nonproduction department costs to production departments; and allocate the resulting (revised) production department costs to various products, services, or customers. Costs derived from this traditional allocation approach suffer from several defects that can result in distorted costs for decision-making purposes. For example, the traditional approach allocates the cost of idle capacity to products. Accordingly, such products are charged for resources that they did not use. Seeking to remedy such distortions, many companies have adopted a different cost-allocation approach called activity-based costing (ABC).

WHAT IS ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING?

In contrast to traditional cost-accounting systems, ABC systems first accumulate overhead costs for each organizational activity, and then assign the costs of the activities to the products, services, or customers (cost objects) causing that activity. As one might expect, the most critical aspect of ABC is activity analysis. Activity analysis is the processes of identifying appropriate output measures of activities and resources (cost drivers) and their effects on the costs of making a product or providing a service. Significantly, as discussed in the next section, activity analysis provides the foundation for remedying the distortions inherent in traditional cost-accounting systems.

TRADITIONAL COST-ACCOUNTINGSYSTEMS VERSUS ABC

Geared toward compliance with financial reporting requirements, traditional cost-accounting systems often allocate costs based on single-volume measures such as direct-labor hours, direct-labor costs, or machine hours. While using a single volume measure as an overall cost driver seldom meets the cause-and-effect...

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