-To allocate certain period costs to products so that financial statements can be prepared monthly, quarterly, and annually
-To provide process control information to cost center managers
-To provide product cost estimates to product and business managers (5, p. 248). First, financial statements are obviously an essential aspect of illustrating an organization’s yearly operations, expenses, and revenue. ABC’s goal is to better enhance the reliability of the financial statements for a proper representation of the yearly production expenses. Second, cost managers rely on the ABC information to provide detailed information regarding processes and how they effect the organization. Third, product managers are in need of very accurate product cost estimates. These estimates are generally much more reliable with an ABC method rather than a traditional cost method.
Overall, these are the goals of an ABC system; however, these objectives will not be met unless the separate functions act as a whole. According to J. Maurice Clark, a professor at the University of Chicago, there are ten important functions for cost accounting:
-To help determine a normal or satisfactory price for goods sold
-To help fix a minimum limit on price-cutting
-To determine which goods are most profitable and which are unprofitable
-To control inventory
-To set a value on inventory
-To test the efficiency of different processes
-To test the efficiency of different departments
-To detect losses, wastes, and pilfering
-To separate the costs of idleness from the cost of producing goods
-To tie in with the financial accounts
Although all of these functions are important for the cost system to work properly, some of these functions appear to be more important than others. Determining which goods are profitable and which are unprofitable can often be a deciding factor in whether an organization will prosper or collapse. The costs of production must be known to fully realize which operations make money for a company. In some instances, the information reported by existing management accounting systems may actually have encouraged bad decisions (5). Having inaccurate costs will certainly make planning considerably harder. It was obvious that the cost accounting methods before 1980 were not satisfying all the managers, and new practices were being requested for more ideal costing information. Also, detecting losses, wastes, and pilfering will cut costs and increase a company’s profit. Often, organizations do not realize that non-value-added activities would hinder profits by using company resources in an inefficient fashion. To better improve operations, the company needs to focus on all of ABC’s facets. Working as a whole is imperative to the advantages of ABC.
An example of how ABC can identify value-added and non-value-added is illustrated with The Doig Corporation. Bob Doig, CEO, implemented ABC to help with his company’s continued improvement to quality processes. We were able to identify which tasks we were doing for no apparent reason, then simplified some of those tasks. Some of the tasks are mandatory such as driving to a customer location to make a sales call but the process got Doig and his team thinking about which customers could be served just as well by phone, thus saving both time and money for the sales reps and the company as a whole (7). Doig utilized his ABC system to better understand his company’s operations by relying on the new, more reliable data. Thanks to ABC, using activities and allocating more indirect expenses allows Doig, as well as other executives, to better document costing.
Horngren, Datar and Foster compare and contrast the traditional costing method with activity-based costing using a cost analysis of baked goods, milk and fruit juice, and frozen products for a supermarket. First the supermarket must identify the activities and their rates that affect the cost of their chosen products.