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History of Accounting
Information on commercial transactions has existed for as long as people have traded with one
another. Ancient civilizations engraved bookkeeping records on stone tablets. More than five
hundred years ago, Luca Pacioli, a mathematician monk, described the basics for a double-entry
booking system. With this double-entry system traders could determine the results of the
transactions they made in the market and could also determine their assets and debts.
During the industrial revolution a lot of production was transfered from individuals to large
companies (texile mills, steel factories, etc.). The whole production and selling of products
consisted of several conversion processes which were all performed in these large companies.
Conversion processes that formerly were supplied at a price through market exchanges became
performed within one organization. A lot of internal transactions occurred as conversion
processes supplied their output to a next process within the organization instead of selling their
output on the market. Owners of these large companies devised systems to summarize the
efficiency by which labor and material were converted to finished products. These early
managerial accounting systems produced efficiency measures such as cost per hour or cost per
pound produced per process and per worker. These measures were used to motivate and
evaluate the workers and their managers (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987, pp 6-12).
In order to calculate the costs of a product, the direct labor costs and direct material costs
('prime costs') of a product were summarized. At the end of the nineteenth century companies
also included indirect costs ("overhead") when calculating the costs of a product. According to
Church and Mann, most companies determined the indirect costs of a product as a percentage
of the direct labor costs (Solomons, 1952, pp 22-23). In 1910 Church wrote "it is a very usual
practice to average this large class of expense (red. indirect costs), and to express its incidence
by a simple percentage either upon wages or upon time. That this plan is entirely misleading
there can be very little doubt, because few of the expenses in the profit and loss accont have
any relation either to each other or to wages or to time. To rely upon an arbitrary established
percentage .. is valueless and even dangerous" (Church, 1910 pp 79-81).
When determining the costs of a product, Church advocated dividing the factory into a series of
'production centers' (e.g. a machine and a group of workers). In this production center method,
the costs of each production center are summarised. The hourly rate of each production center
expresses the total costs of the production center per hour. The costs of a production center is
then loaded on to the work passing through it, at an hourly rate. (Solomons, 1952, pp 25-27).
Budgeting as a tool to forecast expenses is an old practice. Joseph in Egypt made a budget of
corn supplies and planned Pharao's investment and consumption policy in the light of it. In
Great Britain the practice of drawing up a government budget each year is about 250 years old.
In 1911 Bunnell described that each item of overheads was to be budgeted and compared with
the actual expenditure under each head as a way to control costs. This budget for each item of
overheads was a fixed budget, which was not adjusted for changes in the number of products
produced. In 1903 Henry Hess described the basic idea of what we now call a flexible budget.
Hess used a graphical method to compare the budgeted expenditure and actual expenditure.
For each main group of expenses (for instance direct production labor costs) he plotted a
straight line, representing the relationship between expenses and output. Thus the budgeted
expenses were adjusted for changes in levels of output (Solomons, 1952, pp 45-49).
Scientific Management
At the beginning of the twentieth century companies started to use performance standards to
determine the standard costs for processes and products (Solomons, 1952, pp 38-49). The
standard costs of a product or a process are predetermined measures of what costs should be.
The standard costs of a product for instance are determined by multiplying the standard use of
labor, materials, machines, etc. per product by the standard price of labor, materials, machines
etc. These standard costs might be compared with the actual costs in order to monitor the
efficiency in companies. The difference between standard costs and actual costs are analysed in
a variance analysis. Already in 1920, G. Charter Harrison wrote a set of formulas for the analysis
of these cost variances. (Solomons, 1952, pp 50). Today companies still compare their
predetermined or budgeted costs with their actual costs in a variance analysis. In a complete
variance analysis companies also compare their budgeted sales with actual sales. A simple
example of a variance analyis is given below:
budgeted sales volume * budgeted selling price: 1,000 products * Φ 50.00 = Φ 50,000
actual sales volume was lower: only 900 products: 900 products * Φ 50.00
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- 100 products * Φ 50.00 = - Φ 5,000
.
the actual selling price of the product was also lower:
Φ 48.00 instead of Φ 50.00: variance = - Φ 2.00 lower
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900 products * - Φ 2.00 = - Φ 1,800
.
the standard use of labor per product is 1.0 hour and
the standard price of labor is Φ 40.00
in this simple example no other costs are involved
the total standard costs allowed (flexible budget): 900 products * 1.0 * Φ 40.00 = - Φ 36,000
the actual use of labor per product was only 0.9 hour: 900 products * 0.9 * Φ 40.00
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900 products * 0.1 * Φ 40.00 = Φ 3,600
.
the actual price of labor however was higher:
Φ 41.00 instead of Φ 40.00 = Φ 1.00 higher
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900 products * 0.9 * - Φ 1.00 = - Φ 810
+ ----------
actual result: Φ 9.990
Return on Investment
Around 1900, many mass producers, acquired there own distribution channels and own sources
of raw materials and other inputs. These firms performed several activities which were formerly
performed by individual companies. Manufacturing, purchasing, transportation and distribution
became integrated in these multi-activity firms. In these vertically integrated firms, many
individual departments still relied on their own measures of efficiency. Most of these efficiency
measures however could not be related to overall company profit. In order to monitor the
contribution of each activity to overall profit they developped a new performance measure:
return on investment. The return on investment (income / invested capital) ratio helped top
management to monitor the profitability of each individual activity (Johnson and Kaplan, 1987,
pp 61-93)
http://www.duncanwil.co.uk/pdfs/costparty.pdf