Advantages And Disadvantages Of Activity Based Costing

2010 Words9 Pages
The Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is a costing system, which focuses on activities performed to produce products. The Activity-Based Costing is that costing in which costs are first traced to activities and then to products (Cost and Management Accounting 2013). The Activity-Based Costing targets into identifying as many costs possible to be afterward accounted as direct costs of production. Any cost that is traced to a particular product throughout its consumption of activity becomes direct cost of the product. For instance, in accordance with costing system, cost of setup and repairing of time is considered as factory overhead and subsequently assigned to different products on the basis of direct labour hours. But in Activity-Based Costing,…show more content…
Allocation and appointment of fixed factory overheads to the costs centers perpendicularly helps the management aware and being responsible for knowing the real costs and how to provide services to the other centers. The following are Demerits of Absorption Costing System: Absorption costing is not useful for decision making in the management. It considers fixed manufacturing overhead as product cost which increase the cost of output which are not appropriate in the real world. As a result, it does not help in accepting specially offered price for the products which are already produced in the firm. Various types of managerial problems relating to decision making can be solved only with the help of variable costing system. Absorption costing is not helpful in control of cost and planning and control functions due to combination s of all costs in the same roof of the production costs. It is not useful in fixing the responsibility for incurrence of costs because fixed costs and variables costs are combined together. It is not practical to hold a manager accountable for costs over which he/she has not control in the…show more content…
So that, the Activity-Based Costing are more appropriate and useful in the large companies or firms because it is disseminate all costs according to their activities concerned. If the overheads are relatively small, there is no use of Activity Based Costing accordingly; hence the failure of Activity-Based Costing occurred. This is because some of costs will not appear or occur to the cost calculations since the Activity-Based Costing based on each activity conducted in the fields or production. Some companies are producing only one product or few products and not more than two products. If so, the Activity Based Costing cannot be applied in those companies or firms; hence the failure of The Activity-Based Costing appeared. The Activity-Based Costing produces numbers such as product margins that are odds with the numbers produced by traditional costing systems. But managers are accustomed to using traditional costing systems to run their operations and traditional costing systems are often used in performance

More about Advantages And Disadvantages Of Activity Based Costing

Open Document