operate only direct costing systems. The corresponding percentage for the largest companies (annual
sales exceeding £300 million) is 20%. Table 5 also indicates that 43% of the largest firms compared with
12% of the smallest firms had adopted ABC systems.
Table 6 presents a cross tabulation table and frequency distributions for the number of cost pools
and the different types of second stage cost drivers in respect of 112 of the 113 respondents that operated
absorption costing systems. The shaded area in the lower right hand corner represents the more
sophisticated costing systems in terms of the number of cost pools and different types of drivers and
those towards the top left hand corner the least sophisticated systems. Of the 50 companies that are
located in the shaded area 45 out of the 46 companies currently using ABC were located in this area.20
In addition, the number of cost pools and different types of cost drivers was significantly higher for ABC
users compared with non-users (p-value using the t-test < .01, two-tailed). Therefore, the analysis suggests
that those respondents that claim that their organizations have implemented ABC ‘really’ are ABC
adopters.