QUESTION 1
a)Costs can be classified on the basis of cost objective which could be stock valuation or decision making or for control purposes. Describe each classification of cost.
Costs for stock valuation
In costs for stock valuation, all elements related to the production process (Direct and indirec costs) have to be accounted for in getting the accurate cost of a single product. In other words, Direct costs must include all direct materials, labor and other direct costs. Indirect costs must include all production overheads, administrative overheads, selling overheads and distribution overhead costs. All these costs must be included in the stock valuation.
Costs for decision making and planning
This classification looks into the relationship between costs and revenues, the behavior of costs in relation to changes in activity levels and the relevance if costs and revenues.
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This will make them set reasonable prices that will increase the company 's revenues unlike high prices which will discourage the sales volumes and therefore lead to losses.
It is also important for them to know the nature of the costs they incur (Whether they are fixed costs, variable cost, semi variable or semi fixed costs) and how they react at different levels of activities. This will help the managers in controlling and maintaining the costs of production. The relevance of costs and revenues is also important to the managers. They need to know what costs are relevant so that they can account for them in their decision making and planning. The irrelevant costs are not put into consideration in the decision making since they have no impact on the decisions. An example of irrelevant cost is sunk costs and examples of relevant costs are marginal costs and opportunity
If done right, I believe that all of the costs can be allocated to each of the three products through both direct and overhead costs. The only direct costs that are being included currently are labor and manufacturing costs. I broke up overhead into overhead based off direct labor and overhead based on units sold.
Cost management plays a major role when maintaining profit margins. Management must be able to find in which areas of a business costs must be reduced and the consequences that such reductions have in the overall company. In some situations management must change the way the work is being done in order to decrease costs while in other cases changing one supplier for another might be enough, in both situations a tradeoff will occur and the consequences will impact the company as a whole.
The managerial accounting system at Bridgeton, as it is presented, seems to be lacking detail necessary for efficient analysis. The sections used are sales, direct material, direct labor and overhead by account number, each divided into individual accounts and summed to find totals. There is no separation of fixed and variable costs in any of the accounts, making it difficult to analyze exactly where operations are costing money and, therefore, how they could possibly be improved. The presentation of the information groups all sales together and the different categories of costs together and does not provide for individual product analysis. The products are analyzed (categorized into classes) based on their costs, with no consideration to revenues associated with these products, and no real understanding of the overhead applied to each product. The overhead costs are applied to accounts based on labor and materials of the company as a whole, rather than using considerations associated with the individual products.
A couple of Squares has a limited capacity for which to produce their products and smaller companies tend to have larger fixed costs than bigger companies. Therefore, A Couple of Squares must maximize profits in order to ensure that they will stay in business. A profit-oriented pricing objective is also useful because of A Couple of Squares’ increased sales goals. A Couple of Squares increased their sales goals due to recent financial troubles. Maximizing profits is the easiest way to meet these sales goals due to the fact that A Couple of Squares has limited production capacity. The last key consideration favors a profit-oriented pricing objective because A Couple of Squares offers a specialty product. A specialty product often has limited competition, therefore can be priced on customer value. Pricing at customer value will maximize profits as well as customer satisfaction. A Couple of Squares’ lack of production capacity, increased sales goals, and specialty product favor a profit-oriented pricing
In order to find out what are some of the key drivers’ of the analysis I will further run different sensitivity analysis. I think some of the key drivers of our assumptions could be sales growth, production costs as a percentage of sales, inventories as a percentage of cost of goods sold etc.
The amount each company should recognize as expense is given in a given year depends on the following factors
In the case of making a TCO model, also opportunity costs and present value are taken into account. Taking present value into account means; making a difference between future and past cash outlays. This way the time value of money can be considered when comparing the different alternatives. Opportunity costs finally can be described as:
[4] Colin Drury, Management and Costing Accounting, (7th edition), Chapter 3, Cost Assignment, p. 54-59
The new president believes that the key to the new strategy is to be able to understand the true nature (i.e. costs of customers and orders. He feels that if the company is able to tie costs to customers in an accurate manner, it will enable the company to better focus on higher profitability. Major Issues: What is the ' Understand the cost structure of the company. Allocate costs on a per customer and per order basis. Implement a new cost system that will support the new cost allocation methodology.
A cost behavior pattern is the capacity to comprehend how costs change when there is a change in an organization's level of activity. In other words, to successfully predict how organizations’ future profit will be determined, organizations have to know the behavior of cost which will take place as a result of changes in activities such as sales volume (Averkamp, 2017). Cost behavior pattern, similarly refers to the way different types of production costs change when there is a change in the level of production. Understandably, some costs varied proportionately with the changes in the level of activity and these costs are referred to as variable costs. Other costs are often not affected irrespective of changes
Activity-based costing (ABC) is a costing method that is designed to provide managers with cost information for strategic and other decisions that potentially affect capacity and therefore “fixed” as well as variable costs. Activity-based costing is mostly used for internal decision making and managing activities while traditional costing method is used to provide data for external financial reports. Most organization uses activity-based costing as an addition system for using traditional absorption costing as sometimes the traditional cost system misleads the product’s profitability. In a company, there are many products on sale, if one product is sold at a high price with low product margin and a product with high product margin at a low price, it may result in a loss. In addition, due to the reason that cost drivers and enterprises business may change, activity-based costing analysis also needs to be revised periodically. This amendment should be prompted to change pricing, product, customer focus and market share strategy to improve corporate profitability.
Primary production of homogenous goods and several processes are undertaken for the finished product to be realized is what is called process costing. All stages of processing and costs accrued during manufacturing of a product will be added to the final batch of products. Keenness is
Every company has some kind of Revenue and they all have costs that are associated with running the company. It is also true that if a company wants to increase their Revenue, their costs will increase too. It is every company’s goal to maximize revenue and either through Production or Services, and minimize cost. These things are easy to figure out, but actually identifying the production and figuring out how it will increase or decrease with change is very difficult.
...n the companies will have to decrease the price otherwise the product will not be sold at higher prices and the revenue would not be as large as companies would like to.
Therefore, to achieve this objective, managers have to make choices in decision-making, which is the process of selecting a course of action from two or more alternatives (Weihrich & Koontz; 1994, 199). A sound decision making requires extensive knowledge of economic theory and the tools of economic analysis, that are directly related in the process of decision-making. Since managerial economics is concerned with such economic theories and tools of analysis, it is very relevant to the managerial decision-making process.