Traditional Costing Systems (TCS): Treatment of overheads
Volume-based systems (VBC), also known as conventional or traditional costing systems
(TCS), use measures of output volume (such as the number of output units, machine
hours, material costs, direct labour hours and direct labour cost) as the bases to allocate
(i.e. to assign a whole item of cost or of revenue, to a single cost unit, centre account or
time period, CIMA) indirect costs to cost objects (Johnson and Kaplan 1987; Cooper and
Kaplan 1988a). This section will outline the philosophy of the two-stage allocation
process used by traditional costing systems.