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Methods and techniques of cost accounting
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3.0 STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS OF CONVENTIONAL COSTING
3.1 Strength of Conventional Costing
3.1.1 Easy
Traditional costing is very straightforward and somehow not difficult to imply. The manager can easily access and track all the direct costs which related with a certain product, which are the labor and direct material costs. A short and simple way to allocate overhead costs is through using direct labor hours. It would be very complex by assigning overhead costs to various products.
3.1.2 User friendly and little training is needed
Conventional costing is simple, non-complex costing system, hence it is said to be user friendly. Since there is no technological and machines that is involved in it, therefore there is not much training to be performed or to be conducted by the organization. The worker only need basic working skill and specialized skill and techniques are not required. The worker can easily learn up the system without much effort.
3.1.3 Convenient and simple to be applied
In a small firm, conventional costing system can be used. For example, in a small and developing firm that only have one product line, the final cost have no difference no matter uses Conventional Costing System or Activity-based Costing System. Same result of final cost will be obtained. In this case, Conventional Costing System is more convenient to be applied since it is simple and easy to be handled.
3.2 Weaknesses of Conventional Costing
3.2.1 Ability to Distort
Conventional Costing would be useful on presenting the manufacturing cost of a product in a business which manufactures huge amount but limited choices of products. But as times pass by, when there us increment in the diversity of output, more variety of products are being produced, tradit...
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...he overhead costs also causes the quality of the products to be lowered. When the quality of the product became worse, the products of that organization produced cannot meet the expectations of the customers. When the needs of customer is not satisfied, they will not purchase products from the organization, the business of the organization will decline and this will eventually lead to the decrement of the business performance of the organization.
3.2.7 Lack of accuracies
The segregation of obvious traceable and fixed cost is significant in order to do segmented cost reporting. This is crucial due to the traceable fixed cost are engaged to department whereas the common fixed costs are pinned in the conventional costing system. The theory proposed by conventional costing system is too wide and general. This method is obviously lack of accuracies, imprecise, and vague.
Overhead based on units sold includes only sales and marketing. Sales and marketing will be targeted mostly towards the products that are already on the market, and so units sold is the best way to associate the cost with each product. (Figure A)
John Deere Component Works (JDCW), subdivision of John Deere and Co. was in charged specifically of the manufacturing of tractor component parts. The demand for JDCW’s products had problems due to the collapse of farmland value and commodity prices. Numerous and constant failures in JDCW’s competition for bids, alerted top management to start questioning their current costing methods. As an outcome, the analysis has to be guided to research on the current costing methods with the intention of establishing legitimacy and to help the company in adopting a more appropriate costing system.
The presentation of the material is in dollars only. Overhead is applied to products as a percent of direct labor dollar cost. Factory profit for each year is found by subtracting direct material, direct labor, and direct overhead costs from total sales. The overhead percentage is calculated at the same time budgeting and is applied as a single overhead pool throughout each model year. The consulting company used 435% of direct labor costs in 1987 for their study; the budgeted was actually 437% (OH/DL=107,954/24,682). A similar percentage applies in the following year (109890/25294=434.5%). However in the next two years, after the outsourcing of oil pans and mufflers was enacted, the allocation of overhead in...
Cost accounting system has two types, job order costing, and process cost system. These two cost systems are very different, almost every company uses order costing or process costing. Starbucks, is a coffee shop where citizens congregate to drink there morning coffee, study, and or socialize. Starbucks is one of the oldest and largest privately held specialty coffee retailer in the United States. (Starbucks) Their passion is to discover the flavors you love and always bring it home, delivering the look, taste and aroma of the world’s best coffee and teas. Job order costing is a very easy way in order to help Starbucks managers to know how much profit their company (Starbucks) made.
Treating overhead costs as "fixed" can cause an unfair and highly misleading distribution of overhead costs which are in fact variable.
Since more than 40 years, Toyota Company was thinking how to develop the traditional process costing system and the production system. Some of the companies believe that the increasing of the production is a big profit, while Toyota proved the opposite. The more you increase the products out of the need of the market, the more losses you are going to gain. This kin...
The contained paper has been prepared with objectives of elaborating over the three different costing methods namely, Absorption/Full Costing, Variable/Marginal Costing, and Activity Based accounting. The first segment of the report seeks to define and illustrate the costing methods based on the personal understanding of the writer gained through the class room and the academic readings. Part two of the report takes a form of short essay, written critically to evaluate the application of standard costing and variance analysis to any size of business, and concludes with a verdict that whether or not standard costing and variance analysis is applicable to each business with consideration of its costs and benefits of the system.
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.
g is an important tool that can help management in making informed decision. Though it is not legally required but still it is necessary to run an entity effectively. Cost accounting is turned toward the future. There are different methods of costing in Cost Accounting: Absorption costing and Variable costing. Both have some merits over the other.
Job costing involves usage of situations where every job is done cost differently, consumers specifications play a bigger picture in this case. Direct and indirect costs are encountered. It is believed that job costing has lots of costs accrued from the production to the consumers (REEVE, J. M., WARREN, C. S., & DUCHAC, J. E. 2012). This involves labor, running of machines, and all the individuals who are involved in the production of a product from raw to the final product, indirect costs are applied in this order. Job costing order is best showcased in a manufacturing company, let’s take coca cola company, company specialized in beverages manufacturing and distribution, usually customers have no say in the final products of this company, but as the trends for consumption of a certain flavor, according to their statistics they will conform with the demands. The special requirements, like name branding on the bottles of the beverages, customization of the containers have had a significant impact in the consumption of coca cola products (Weygandt, J. J., Kieso, D. E., & Kimmel, P. D. 2010).
The second way is to achieve low direct and indirect operating costs is gained by offering high volumes of standard products and offering basic no-frills products. Production costs are kept low by using less parts and using standard components. Limiting the number of models produced to ensure larger producti...
Others feel that ABC would be more widespread in industry if it were marketed better by the cost accounting profession itself [1]. As the dust has settled, ABC has turned out to be less a revolutionary technique than a useful refinement to proven systems. The costs of products and services must be accurate, or management can be misled. Decisions... ...
...pplied. Cost estimation and analysis could ultimately determine major decisions in both the business and political worlds today, and play a crucial role even in our day to day lives. Through activity based costing one is able to see what areas need improvement and also whether or not a business will be successful after considering all the factors. These tools are very powerful in drawing wise conclusions from cost analysis and can be a priceless tool to have even in the field of engineering.
The overall purpose of cost accounting is to advise top administration and the management team on the most suitable and cost effective methods and actions to employ based on cost, capability and efficiencies of a given product or service. It can be defined as the method where all the expenditures used during execution of business activities are gathered, categorized, examined and noted down (Horngren & Srikant, 2000). Once these numbers are gathered and recorded the information is used to determine a selling price and/or to identify possible investment opportunities. Although the principal aim or function of cost accounting is to help the business administration with their decision making and business planning process, the cost accounting data
Marginal costing usually advantageous for a company to do the management decision making. Hence, there is not an obviously way under the marginal costing to look at the financial statement. For absorption costing is request under inventories. Thus, absorption costing is often use for the external financial reporting and income tax reporting. (“Different…Absorption costing and Marginal costing”, Peidaa.com, November 2015). Next, the profitability for two costing is totally different as the marginal costing is measured by profit volume ratio and the absorption costing will influence the profitability because consists of the fixed cost. Other than that, the classification of the overhead for two costing also not alike. Fixed and variable cost is used for the marginal costing and the absorption costing is applied with the production, administration and selling&