...Tutorial 5 Q1 Describe the shortcomings of traditional approaches to overhead cost analysis. A traditional approach is a costing method that is used to allocate manufacturing costs to specific products. It uses single cost driver such as machine hours, direct labour hours to allocate indirect manufacturing costs. Traditional costing approaches can referred as the conventional method. However, there are many cost drivers in reality when factory overhead occurred, such as machines setups, or inspections. Since it missed out the others cost driver, it may fail to identify opportunities for cost efficiency, or allocate inaccurate per-unit cost, subsequently will results the managers unable to make a clear and strategic decision during costing. Nevertheless, traditional costing approaches also may not take into account consumer demand or unique features of product; it might reduce the improvements of the organization. Even though traditional approaches may easy to apply in each size of manufacturing business, yet it will become less reliable due to increased in the level of diversity of output rises and the level of complicated of manufacturing project. For example, if a business that has a lot of overhead expenses, it needs a more reliable and accurate costing approaches to identify or allocate the overhead costs to different products. If the costs and prices allocated incorrectly will causes the competitive position affected. Manufacturing environment has tried hard to find...
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...The implementation of Activity Based Costing (ABC) in Chinese refining manufacturers Table of contents 1. Introduction 2 1.1 Research background 2 1.2 domestic and foreign research status 4 1.2.1 Activity-based costing development process 4 1.2.2 Status quo of Activity-Based Costing Development and Application in China 6 1.3 research contents 8 2. Related theories 9 2.1concept of ABC 9 2.2 rationales 10 2.3 difference between ABC and traditional costing 12 2.3.1. Different calculating targets 12 2.3.2 Different calculation 12 2.3.3. Different Finished goods costs term 13 3. Research methodology 13 3.1 case study 13 3.2 The survey method 13 3.3 Literature 14 4. Research Results 14 4.1 problems of traditional costing method in oil refining enterprise 14 4.2suggestions for Chinese enterprises’ application ABC 15 Bibliography 15 1. Introduction 1.1 Research background With the rapid development of the national economy, enterprises’ competition is increasingly fierce; many companies are using advanced science and technology to achieve competitive advantage in the market. Market competition and technological progress are the two fundamental economic factors which generate activity-based costing. Since The beginning of 1980s of the 20th century, the activity based cost method is paid a wide range of attention; the developed countries gradually adopt it in a number of advanced enterprises...
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...online articles and journals were available through these search engines such as Google, Infoseek, Lycos, Excites and Altavista. These articles were downloaded from Internet Websites including IFAC library, CPA online newsletters, Institute of Management Accountants, CIMA (Chartered Institute of Management Accountants), Technical Bulletin and Institute of Commercial and Financial Accountants. The modern techniques used in Management Accounting are discussed. TQM (Total Quality Management), ABC (Activity Based Costing) and BSC (Balanced score card) are some of the tools that are introduced in management accounting to keep up with the latest technology. This research highlights the emergence of new, more proactive management accounting that increasingly becomes part of the management team with the business process. The future roles and expectations of these accountants in the competitive global economy are discussed. Keywords: Management accounting, Standard Costing Activity based costing, Balanced Scorecard, Information Technology INTRODUCTION M anagement Accounting is a process of providing financial and non-financial information for managers. Managers need to include information for planning and controlling either short or long-term decisions....
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...1) In the early stage, costing system was viewed as a method of accounting that used various techniques to assign costs to particular cost objectives, e.g. the cost to perform an activity, produce a product or render a service. W.B. Lawrence stressed the importance of accountants becoming familiar with cost accounting in his 1930 text because even then, “the modern factory occupies more space and employs many more workers than did the factory of a generation ago”. In 1940, John Blocker recommended in his text additional uses for cost accounting in other industries, such as construction, mining, utilities and nonprofit organizations. He believed that all of these businesses needed to consider that the costing in different departments within a company could be controlled through cost accounting. Even in the 1960’s accountants and system designers developed cost accounting to do more than measure performance. Cost accounting was an integral part of planning and control in businesses. After that, the concept of activity-based costing (ABC) was introduced in the US, initially in the manufacturing sector during 1970s and 1980s. Robert Cooper and Robert Kaplan brought the ABC concept to light and published the body of knowledge in the Harvard Business Review in 1988. Cooper and Kaplan defined ABC method as an approach to solve the problems of traditional cost management systems; that is, the conventional cost accounting systems are often unable to identify correctly the true...
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...World Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 1. No. 1. March 2011. Pp. 148 - 164 Significance of Management Accounting Techniques in Decision-making: An Empirical Study on Manufacturing Organizations in Bangladesh Farjana Yeshmin* and Md. Amran Hossan** Management accounting is concerned with gathering and reporting internal financial information to facilitate decision-making process. As management accounting is not required to conform to national accounting standards, it allows business to customize the management accounting techniques as per demand of company. As a process of this customization, some advanced quantitative as well as number of qualitative techniques accompany with the traditional techniques, have been emerged to cater the information need in decision making. This study attempts to measure the significance of management accounting techniques in decision making of the selected manufacturing organizations in Bangladesh. In doing so, a total of 74 manufacturing organizations have been surveyed with a structured questionnaire by using 5 point Likert Scale measurement from different categories of manufacturing organizations. Findings reveal that cash flow statement analysis, ratio analysis, budgetary control, CVP analysis, variance analysis and fund flow analysis have been frequently high-ranking techniques. Secondly, the authors have recognized five factors to calculate the variability in decision-making with the help of rotated component matrix which shows that 75.125...
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...Health Specifics of the Activity-Based Applications in Hospital Management Boris Popesko * Tomas Bata University in Zlin, Czech Republic * Corresponding Author; Email: popesko@fame.utb.cz Abstract Paper analyses the specifics of the application of Activity-Based Costing method in hospital management. Primary objective of the paper is to outline the methodology of the ABC application in hospitals. First part of the paper analyzes the ways of ABC implementation in published foreign studies. Second part describes the individual steps in ABC application and discusses the differences in the application procedures between the manufacturing and hospital organization. Key words: Healthcare Management, Cost Management, Activity-based costing, Introduction In the last decade, many non-profit and hospital organizations started to face difficulties and challenges in balancing limited resources and costs to provide their demand for services. Due to the introduction of modern medical techniques and medicines and consequent increase of consumed costs, many hospitals are under pressure to adopt more advanced cost management techniques usually utilized only in profit organization sector. Hospital managers frequently seek the advanced techniques, for better understanding of relations between the cost and provided services. One of the key factors of effective company management is ability of accurate estimation of the cost of products. Product costing is an essential economic tool...
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...1.0 Introduction Based on the article of a traditional cost management VS lean cost management by Mahanim Hanid, Lauri Koskela and Mohan Sinwardena, the term of cost management is not a well defined term. It’s built on both cost accounting and management accounting, but goes beyond these two terms (P. Agrawal and Mehra 1998). For Brinker (1996) defines it as a set of techniques and methods for controlling and improving a company’s activities and processes, its products and services. In addition, Maskel (2009) also described that the cost and management accounting is used internally to help the company’s manager control and improve the business. Although there is an accounting standards associated with these tasks, there is no legal requirement to perform these tasks in any particular way or to perform them at all. A company can do as much or as little cost and management accounting as it wishes and it can be done in any way it wants. Furthermore, cost accounting practices are seldom exactly similar in different companies (P. Agrawaland and Mehra 1998). According to text referred, cost management is equally important to all companies, regardless of size. Small companies generally have tighter monetary controls, mainly because of the risk with the failure of as little as one project, but with less sophisticated control techniques. Large companies may have the luxury to spread project losses over several project whereas the small company may have few projects. Cost management...
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... and control of an organization’s operations. Internal Users Financial Accounting Published financial statements and other financial reports. External Users Managerial Accounting Users of information Managers within company Regulation Financial Accounting Interested outside parties Required. Must comform to Not required because for internal GAAP which is regulated by use only FASB and SEC. Basic accounting system plus Almost exclusively from the Source of Data various other sources basic accounting system Reports often focus on subunits. Reports focus on the enterprise Nature of Reports Based on a combination of in its entirety. Based on and Procedures historical data, estimates, and historical transactions. projections of future events. Managerial Accounting Financial Accounting Deals with activities inside an organization Deals with reporting to parties outside the organization Unregulated Highly regulated May use projections about the future Primarily uses historical data 6...
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...processes. These issues cut across the wider domain of management, and are not just the province of management accountants. Research limitations/implications – There is limited value in conducting future surveys of the adoption and implementation of SMA or SMA techniques. Rather, the focus should be on how SMA-inspired techniques and processes diffuse into general practice within organizations. Originality/value – Twenty-five years after the term strategic management accounting was first introduced in the literature, this paper brings together disparate literature and provides a broad assessment of the “state-of-the-art” of strategic management accounting to inform researchers and practitioners. Keywords Strategic management, Accounting, Activity based...
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...Problems and Perspectives in Management, Volume 12, Issue 4, 2014 Emmanuel K. Oseifuah (South Africa) Activity based costing (ABC) in the public sector: benefits and challenges Abstract Peter Drucker (1986), in “Management: Tasks, responsibilities, and practices” states that business enterprises and public-service institutions, are organs of society which do not exist for their own sake, but to fulfil a specific social purpose and to satisfy need of society, community, or individual. To achieve the above objectives, managers of these institutions must plan, control and make decisions about the resources entrusted to their care. A key element of efficient organizational decision making is to use reliable information, both operational and managerial accounting data for analysis and decision support. This can be achieved by using activity-based costing (ABC) method. The underlying premise of ABC is that resources are consumed by activities to produce outputs or products and services (US General Services Administration, 2006). It focuses on the allocation of indirect costs to products and services, which was traditionally done on arbitrary basis. ABC is useful in two situations: areas with large and growing indirect and support costs (Krumwiede, 1998a; Becker, Bergener and Räckers, 2010), and areas with a large variety in products, customers and processes (Cooper, 1988a, 1988b; Groot, 1999). The unique characteristic of public sector organizations as overhead-intensive...
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...Activity-Based Costing: A Tool for Manufacturing Excellence ABC is a strategic weaoon in the Quest for comoetitive oosition. By Peter B.B. Turney, Ph.D. This article exammes rne role of actiVity-based costing in the achievement of manufacturing excellence. It describes manufacturing excellence and the product cost information requirements of managers who seek to achieve it. It shows how conventional product costing fails to meet these needs, and demonstrates how activity-based costing corrects these deficiencies. It explains how managers in manufacturing companies can use activitybased costing for strategic, product design, and continuous improvement purposes. Finally, the article lays to rest fears that activity-based costing may be too costly and complex to be compatible with manufacturing excellence. and sustaining a comA chievingadvantage via attention petitive manufacturing excellence requires to all aspects of manufacturing performance. This attention requires that managers have information that helps them choose correct strategies, improve product design, and remove waste from operating activities. Conventional product costing systems provide little information on these sources of competitive advantage. Schrader Bellows found that the product costs generated by their conventional system were so inaccurate they encouraged management to adopt strategies which inhibited the improvement of manufacturing.' Product designers at the Portable Instrument Division of Tektronix...
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...2010-023X Factors Influencing Activity-Based Costing Success: A Research Framework Zhang Yi Fei and Che Ruhana Isa becoming more and more popular [3-7] ABC aims to provide accurate costing information to managers to allocate activity costs to products and services by applying cost drivers [8]. Academics who advocate ABC, such as, Cooper and Kaplan [9], and Swenson [10] argue that it provides more accurate cost data needed to make appropriate strategic decisions about product mix, sourcing, pricing, process improvement, and evaluation of business process performance. These claims have led many firms to adopt ABC systems [8]. The benefits of ABC and its positive impact on firm’s performance motivated a numerous studies which examined various aspects of ABC. Among such studies are McGowan [11] who assessed the integrity of ABC success, Innes and Mitchell [4, 12] and Yanren [13] who conducted research on factors affecting ABC adoption, and Shield [3], Shields and McEwen [14], Gosselin [15] and Baired et al.[16, 17]who concentrated on factors influencing ABC success especially at the implementation stage. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests most of firms are experiencing problems in implementing ABC and, in some extreme cases, ABC implementation is not successful [3], which later resulted in abandoning the ABC systems altogether [15]. Questions arise as to why ABC implementation is successful in certain companies and fails in others. Based on the contingency theory, researchers...
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...2010-023X Factors Influencing Activity-Based Costing Success: A Research Framework Zhang Yi Fei and Che Ruhana Isa becoming more and more popular [3-7] ABC aims to provide accurate costing information to managers to allocate activity costs to products and services by applying cost drivers [8]. Academics who advocate ABC, such as, Cooper and Kaplan [9], and Swenson [10] argue that it provides more accurate cost data needed to make appropriate strategic decisions about product mix, sourcing, pricing, process improvement, and evaluation of business process performance. These claims have led many firms to adopt ABC systems [8]. The benefits of ABC and its positive impact on firm’s performance motivated a numerous studies which examined various aspects of ABC. Among such studies are McGowan [11] who assessed the integrity of ABC success, Innes and Mitchell [4, 12] and Yanren [13] who conducted research on factors affecting ABC adoption, and Shield [3], Shields and McEwen [14], Gosselin [15] and Baired et al.[16, 17]who concentrated on factors influencing ABC success especially at the implementation stage. However, there is mounting evidence that suggests most of firms are experiencing problems in implementing ABC and, in some extreme cases, ABC implementation is not successful [3], which later resulted in abandoning the ABC systems altogether [15]. Questions arise as to why ABC implementation is successful in certain companies and fails in others. Based on the contingency theory, researchers...
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...Activity Based Costing in the Public Sector By: Brandy Medina Public sector organizations at all levels and of all types are facing intense pressure to do more with less. Governments at all levels in almost all the countries in the world are feeling some kind of pressure. The pressure on spending comes from many sources, i.e. from politicians aiming to win taxpayers’ approval. There is pressure from the competition with other cities to attract homebuyers or with other counties, states or nations to attract businesses. In the United States, the cities don’t just compete against other cities – each city competes against its own suburbs, and the suburbs often have an advantage in attracting residents and businesses. They may offer lower taxes, better schools and less crime. As residents and businesses relocate, the cities and towns they departed from lose a little more of their tax base. Less money is available unless tax rates are raised. Additional pressure may come from declining demand, regardless of the reasons. An example is rural road maintenance. In these cases, economies of scale are less easily achieved, and the final costs become more expensive. In the United States, the federal government is shifting some responsibilities to state and local governments but providing only limited funding to fulfill those obligations. Regardless of where the pressure is coming from, the message is: better, faster, cheaper – hold the line on taxes, but don’t let service slip. Meeting...
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...Management Accounting in the Organization The purpose of management accounting in the organization is to support competitive decision making by collecting, processing, and communicating information that helps management plan, control, and evaluate business processes and company strategy. The interesting thing about management accounting is that it is rare to find an individual within a company with the title of “management accountant.” Often many individuals function as accountants within the organization, but these individuals typically operate as financial accountants, costs accountants, tax accountants, or internal auditors. However, the ability to develop and use good management accounting (which covers a lot more ground than the product costing done by cost accountants) is actually an important ability for many individuals, including finance professionals, operational and marketing managers, top-level executives, and information technologists. Generally, in a very large company, each division has a top accountant called the controller, and much of the management accounting that is done in these divisions comes under the leadership of the controller. On the other hand, the controller usually reports to the vice president of finance for the division who, in turn, reports to the division’s president and/or overall chief financial officer (CFO). All of these individuals are responsible for the flow of good accounting information that supports the planning, control, and evaluation...
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