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ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING
(ABC)

Problems with Traditional Costing Systems (TCS)

The traditional costing system was developed in the early of 1900s. In those days most
manufacturing companies were labor intensive, the product variety was small, and the
overhead costs were generally very low compared to today.

In the late 1970s and particularly 1980s, FOH costs have increased significantly and the
direct costs of material and labor have decreased due to the advances in technology and
productivity. For example, increased automation has reduced the use of worker (DL) and
increased depreciation. In addition, most companies started to produce more varieties of
their products to satisfy different needs for different customers. Moreover, non-
manufacturing indirect costs such marketing expenses became very important and
significant to achieve customer satisfaction.

The traditional approach to cost-allocation often allocate FOH to cost objects based on
single-volume measures as an overall cost driver such as direct-labor hours, direct-labor
costs, or machine hours.

Traditional Costing considers only Indirect manufacturing costs as Product Cost.
Non-manufacturing costs such as selling and administrative costs are not assigned to
products or services. However, many of these non-manufacturing costs are significant
part of the costs of the products and can be identified with certain products. For example,
sales commission, shipping costs, and warranty repair costs can be easily traced to
individual products and services.

Traditional Costing uses a single allocation base to allocate FOH costs to cost objects,
which may result in cost smoothing phenomenon. Cost smoothing or peanut butter
costing describes a costing approach that uses broad averages to assign the indirect cost
of resources uniformly to cost objects when the individual products, services, or
customers in fact use those resources in a non-uniform way. This, in turn, may result
in over-costing some products and under-costing some others (a phenomenon called
product cost cross-subsidization.

Product under-costing occurs when a product consumes a relatively high level of
resource but is reported (allocated) to have a relatively low total cost due to under
allocation of indirect costs. This may result in unrecognized losses on sales from
under pricing.

Product over-costing occurs when a product consumes a relatively low level of
resources but is reported to have a relatively high total cost. This may result in loss
of sales from overpricing. Consequently, the company might erroneously drop
certain successful products.
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Activity-Based Costing (ABC)
ABC is a costing approach that assigns costs to products or services based on their
consumption of resources via activities required for the manufacturing of the products
or providing services. It is based on the premise that a firm's products or services are
performed by activities and that the required activities incur costs. Cost of resources is
assigned to activities, then activities are assigned to cost objects based on their use.
ABC recognizes the causal relationships of cost drivers to activities. ABCs major
advantage is that it improves the traceability of overhead costs thus minimizes distortion
of product costs.


Figure 1
TRADITIONAL COSTING SYSTEM (TCS)




Direct
Mat.

Direct
Labor

FOH are allocated
based on one or two
allocation bases
Selling and Administrative
Expenses
(Period Cost)



Cost Objects
(e.g., Product, Service, Customer, etc.)





ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING (ABC)




Direct Costs
DM + DL

Non-Production
Costs that can be
traced to cost
objects
e.g., shipping ,
Sales Comm.,
advertising ,etc.
All Other Indirect Costs
Manufacturing & Non-Manufacturing costs are
allocated to cost objects in two stages


Stage I: Allocate Costs to Activity Cost Pools



Activity Cost-Pools
Stage II: Allocate Cost Pools to Cost Objects






Cost Objects
e.g., Products, Services, Customers, etc.
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Mechanics of Activity-Based Costing

In order to produce and sell a product or a service, a firm should carry out thousands of different
activities.

An activity is an event or a task or an action that should be taken to perform a particular business
operation. Examples include: designing/developing a product, purchasing and receiving raw
material or parts, setting up a machine to process a particular order, operating a machine,
scheduling production to fulfill orders, inspecting products, correcting defective units,
packaging, shipping products, customer services, etc.

Performing each of these activities consume resources (i.e., incurring costs). Following are the
steps of designing and implementing an ABC system:

1. Identify all the activities that the firm has to perform in order to produce a product or to
perform a service.

2. Estimate the resources (i.e., costs) required to fulfill each activity.

3. Identify activity cost pools. Since it is impractical to track thousands of activities, it is
important to simplify the process by grouping each set of similar activities into one activity
cost pool. For example, activities that could be associated with running a machine may
include the costs of labor, maintenance and power. These costs usually incurred when the
machine is running.

A useful way to think about forming activity cost pools is to organize them into four
general categories/levels (cost hierarchy): (a) unit-level, (b) batch-level, (c) product-
level, and (d) organization-level activities.

(a). Unit-level activities: Activities that are performed each time a unit is produced.
The costs incurred to perform activities at the unit level are assigned to each unit
produced.

Examples unit-level include direct materials, direct labor, indirect materials, and
certain types of indirect costs that are highly correlated with the units produced such as
electricity to run machine, depreciation of machines, maintenance of machines, etc.
Each unit produced consumes the same amount of these resources. The activity
measure (allocation base) for this cost pool could be units produced or machine-
hours.

(b). Batch-level activities: Activities that are performed each time a batch of goods is
processed, regardless of how many units are in the batch. For examples, tasks such as
placing purchase orders, setting up machines, and arranging for shipments to
customers are batch-level activities. Costs incurred at the batch-level depend on the
number of batches processed regardless of the number of units produced in each
batch. The batch-level costs are indirect to each individual units produced but are
directly related to the batch.
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(c). Product-level activities: Activities that are related to a specific product regardless
of how many units produced or batches run. Examples of this type of activities
include, designing & developing a product, and advertising for a product.

(d). Facility-level activities: Activities that are carried out regardless of which
products are produced, how many batches are run, or how many units are produced.




4. Develop Activity Measures for each Activity Cost Pool:

An activity measure is a cost driver that causes the amount of costs incurred in
an activity cost pool to change. The activity measures are used as an allocation
base to assign the costs accumulated in a cost pool to the users of the cost pool.
There are two types of drivers (indicators) for the amount of resources consumed
each time a user (i.e., a cost object) uses an activity:

Transaction Driver: A simple count of the number of times an activity occurs
(e.g., # of bills sent out to customers, assuming that all bills consume the same
amount of time to prepare).

Duration Driver: A measure of the amount of time required to perform an
activity.

5. Compute activity rates (i.e., the cost per unit of activity)
Activity rate for each cost pool is calculated as follows:

The activity rate = the total cost assigned to an activity cost pool
the total amount of activity for the cost pool

6. Assign costs to cost objects.
The activity rates can then be used to assign costs to all cost objects that consume or use the
cost pool. Following is the allocation equation:

Assigned costs = the activity rate x the amount of activity used up by the cost object.



ABC and GAAP
According to GAAP, firms are required to use the actual traditional costing system
(absorption Costing) for external reporting purpose. Most companies, however, adopt ABC
system for internal reporting system as a decision making tool. Thus, in most firms the ABC
system is not integrated with the companys regular costing system.
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Example

Aerotech produces three products of printed circuit boards referred to as Model I, Model II, and
Model III. The complexity and quality of these products increase as the number of model
increases.
The company determine the selling price of each product by adding 25% markup above the
total production cost per unit.
Aerotech uses traditional normal costing system and applies FOH to each product based on DL
hours. The following information is obtained from the company's records:
o Budgeted total Factory Overhead = $3,894,000
o Budgeted Direct Labor Hours = 118,000
o Budgeted Machine hours = 43,000 hours
o Direct labor wage rate is $20/hour.

Model I Model II Model III
Production:
Units
Runs (batches)

10,000
1 of 10,000

20,000
4 of 5000

4,000
10 of 400
DM/unit $50 $90 $20
DL hours/unit 3 hours 4 hours 2 hours
Setup time (hours/run) 10 hours 10 hours 10 hours
Machine time (hours/unit) 1 hour 1.25 hours 2 hours

Following are detailed data about the FOH costs:

Cost Pool
Machine Operating costs
Costs
$1,212,600
Allocation Base
Machine hours
Setup Costs 3,000 Number of runs
Engineering Costs 700,000 Time spent on each product

General Facility Costs

507,400
(25% model I, 45% model II, and 30% model III)
Direct Labor Hours

Other FOH Costs:
Receiving/Inspection


200,000


Time spent on each product

Material Handling

600,000
(6% model I, 24% model II, and70% model III)
Time spent on each product
(7% model I, 30% model II, and 63% model III)

Quality Inspection

421,000

Time spent on each product
(20% model I, 40% model II, and 40% model III)
Packaging 250,000 Time spent on each product
(4% model I, 30% model II, and 66% model III)
Total FOH 3, 894,000


Required:
Determine the total Production Cost and selling price for each product under:
1. Traditional Costing System, using DL Hours as an allocation base.
2. ABC Costing System