Production Overheads Based On Direct Labour Hours Essay

“Companies can choose to use the accounting job order costing method when they have a single product line or numerous products to manufacture. However, it is less costly and less time-consuming if they elect to use process costing when calculating the manufacturing of a single product line. With similarities

Glaser Health Products manufactures medical items for the health care industry. Production involves machining, assembly and painting. Finished units are then packed and shipped. The financial controller is interested to introduce an activity-based costing (ABC) system to allocate (or distribute) indirect costs to products. Indirect costs, as distinct from direct costs, cannot be unambiguously linked to specific products. The controller would like to calculate product costs based on ABC for planning and control, not inventory valuation.

Wilkerson’s existing cost system is based on traditional cost system, where all the manufacturing overhead is expressed as a percentage of the direct labor.

• This cost method does not provide the best system for JDCW’s cost allocation. By using only three overhead rates the present system grossly undermines the true production costs since other activities of the production process are not acknowledged.

JDCW employed a traditional standard costing system throughout its operations. This form of costing permeated the industrial era, which was categorised by low overhead costs and the production of a limited variety of goods. Standard costing involves allocating overheads to cost objects using volume based cost drivers, such as machine or labour hours. Albeit easy to implement and understand, this system frequently results in over costing and under costing.

Plum’s simple costing system allocates all manufacturing overhead on the basis of machine-hours, an output unit-level cost driver. Consequently, the more

Overhead costs are not in proportion to the production output because of the method they are using. This leads to inaccurate pricing and costing decisions. An Activity Based Costing System would help find the real relationship between the products produced and overhead.

In addition, it wrongly allocated its indirect costs at volume bases. The use of process technology mentioned in the case led to an increase in factory overheads Since direct labor hours was not a cost driver of them, allocating its large proportion of fixed factory overheads and other indirect batch-level costs on the basis of DLHs in this cost system did not accurately measure how resources were being used. As a result, these inaccurate allocations would have significant costs to Elkay. Moreover, it disregarded its cost structure in which most costs were “fixed” that would not vary in the short run and should be allocated based on its practical capacity. By using the “actual sales volume” as the allocation base for allocating its large corporate overheads, this standard costing system in fact over-pricing its products for its actual productivity was lower than the practical capacity under the intense competition. As a consequence of all problem within the standard costing system, PPD urgently needed an accurate costing system.

Assigning the overhead costs to the products shows how profitable the products are after deducting all cost. However, it is important to find the appropriate method of overhead cost allocation. In Sippican’s case the traditional accounting method is used, which does not reflect the real resource usage of the different product lines. The correct method in this case would be to apply the time-driven ABC approach for cost allocation. Such method apart from showing the actual profitability after all cost deductions also depicts the differences in resource usage rates between the products and, thus, allows for identification of cost drivers. A contribution margin

A common misconception made by management of a company is that a single definition of cost is ideally suited to all types of manufacturing decision. What a manager’s plan to produce must be well known to him and always taken into account where he fails to realize this, difficulty arises in determining the cost of production. This gives rise to two reasons for the difficulty in determining the cost of products produced. First, the relationship between the cost incurred and output produced is often difficult establish. Secondly, cost may be assembled, combined and reported in different ways.

One of the main distinctions of ABC from overhead absorption costing is that overheads are accumulated to each separate activity, rather than the department, so called cost centres. In ABC this represents activity cost centre. Furthermore in ABC each different each activity cost centre has its own, suitable allocation base, and than is directly absorbed to cost object, so they are not absorbed in mainstream departments, like in traditional costing systems. Another distinction of ABC is that service support costs are assigned to a separate support activity centre, where separate cost driver rates are established and than portioned directly to cost objects, whereas in traditional cost systems, support costs are assigned to production cost centres and than allocated to cost objects, therefore they are absorbed within production cost centre. Overall ABC gives more detailed view of true resource consumption and links activities costs directly with manufacturing overheads and prime costs. Moreover ABC method helps organisations in cost control, as some activities cost may vary directly with production level; however they have different allocation bases. Where in traditional absorption costing these activities are not regarded as volume related, and are assigned with other fixed costs. This is where ABC is better method as it concentrates on identifying each factor that derives cost.

The purpose of this memo is to discuss and evaluate our traditional cost based system versus the new activity based or discrete product costing system. I am going to highlight some of the positive aspects of the new system, discuss future scope and improvements along with some deeper analysis into our unprofitable products and customers.

The traditional budgeting model is built on an erroneous understanding of the overhead apportionments. Mostly, the companies use the labour hours, and the machines hours to allocate the overheads into different cost units. In reality, a single cost driver like the labour hours and the machine hours does not affect the incurrence of the overheads. The rate of consumption of the materials or the labour hours differs among the various product lines and the departments. Some products lines may consume a little amount of a given type of an overhead compared to another. When the absorptions rate used is not the real costs driver of the overhead used in a given product line, the costs will be either over or underestimated (Richards, 2011, p.78). The use of overall absorption rate produces information that is unreliable for use by the managers. They have to come up with strategies to control costs and compete effectively in the market.

In the traditional management system, the main emphasis is on the volumes allocated to overhead costs and overhead items. The main costing element under it is the Activity Bases Costing (ABC). ABC tries to utilize cost drivers in terms of both volume and nonvolume of activities and raw materials. Managers

Hence we can Estimated Indirect (overhead) cost per unit is quite different for each product, unlike the traditional costing where indirect costs per unit were the same for all four products. This approach recognizes that product W uses more activity pool resources than product X , product Y and product Z .