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Advantages Of Activity Based Cost In Accounting

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Task 1 Introduction Activity based cost simply is an accounting method that shows the actions an organization or a firm clearly assigns costs to products. ABC system indicates the connection between activities, costs and production. This system can be used in reduction of overhead costs and it is usually used in complex environment where production processes are shortened. (Investopedia, 2016) To give a further lighting of the activity cost system the process flow is as follows: According to Accountingtools.com, (2016), Activity based costing process flow as follows: Showing costs; firstly the ABC system is there to identify costs that an organization would want to allocate and this is the most important step in the whole process. Since it does not …show more content…

The Cost implication of the ABC system: ABC systems involve cooperation among organization therefore employees needs to take out time from their day-to-day activities to assist the ABC process; for instance, to identify costly activities. Passing on costs to activities takes time which can lead to identifying and tracking cost drivers. And passing on costs to products involves an important amount of time in the accounting department. For example having 15 cost pools (activities), each with a predetermined overhead rate used to assign overhead costs to the company’s 80 products—not an unrealistic example for a large company. The accounting costs incurred to maintain such a system can be prohibitively high. Application of fixed costs can be misleading: Product costing comprising allocation of costs from activity centers to products and computing a products cost per unit. The major disadvantage of this method is that fixed costs are frequently large portion of the overhead costs being allocated for example, building and machinery, depreciation and supervisor salaries. Fixed costs are costs that doesn’t change in total but activity

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