PREPARING DISTRIBUTION (SELLING) EXPENSE BUDGETS
Distribution expense are not product costs and are not allocated to specific products. A separate distribution expense plan should be developed for each responsibility center in the distribution function. Typically, this would encompass “home-office” centers and “field” centers. The top marketing executive has the overall responsibility for developing the distribution expense plans or budgets. Following the principle of participation, the manager of each responsibility center should be assigned direct responsibility for that department’s distribution expense plan. Thus, the promotion manager should be responsible for developing the promotion plan, and the field sales managers should be responsible for developing both their marketing plans (see Chapter 5) and their distribution expense budgets. The distribution expense budgets should separately identify controllable and noncontrollable expense, and these budgets should be detailed by interim time period. The distribution expense budgets prepared by the sales managers should be based on a planned volume of activity or output. Usually the preferable activity base (that is, the method of measuring output or activity) for the various responsibility centers in the distribution function is sales dollars.