Activity Based Costing Theories

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Related Theories and Concepts Activity-Based Costing Definition Activity-based costing is an approach to the costing and monitoring of activities which involves tracing resource consumption and costing final outputs. Resources are assigned to ac-tivities, and activities to cost objects based on consumption estimates. The latter utilize cost drivers to attach activity costs to outputs. (CIMA Official Terminology, 2005) Broadly, activity-based costing is an approach for allocating overhead costs. More specif-ically, ABC allocates overhead to multiple activity cost pools, and it then assigns the activity cost pools to products and services by means of cost drivers. In activity-based costing, an activity is any event, action, transaction, or…show more content…
Instead of classifying overhead costs by department, costs are organized into activity cost pools for related activities. The basic premise of ABC is that activities consume resources and cost objects use ac-tivities. Thus, ABC assigns resource costs to cost objects based on the activities used by the cost objects. For instance, costs associated with design changes, such as an engineer's time or extra factory labor, might be accumulated and assigned to products based on the number of engineer-ing change orders for each product. In addition to product costing, ABC can provide useful in-formation for performance measurement, cost control, and strategic decisions. The same re-source and activity drivers used for product costing describe the cost and effort required to carry out activities. These performance measures can be used to support cost reduction and reengineering efforts through business process analysis. Chrysler Corporation, for example, estimates that since 1991, ABC has helped to…show more content…
This may be achieved by entering into additional markets and/or pricing strategies. Usually, firms improve, alter or change their products, or develop new marketing strategies or improving advertisement (Business Dictionary). According to Shim and Siegel (2009), a firm has product diversity when products absorb overhead activities in different proportions. And this diversity is caused by how the firm design the products and its manufacturing process (Hansen, et al., 2009). As cited in Anderson and Renault (1999), Chamberlin argued that product differentiation affects marginal cost. Not only that, it also distorts the product costs by having an inaccurate allocation of overhead costs. Thus, product diversifiction influence the decision of the company in adopting cost system and its implementation. Moreover, Hansen (et al., 2009), said that firms with high product diversity are most likely to adopt
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