Selling and Administrative Costs There are two broad categories of nonproduction costs: selling costs and administrative costs. For external financial reporting, selling and administrative costs are noninventoriable or period costs. Noninventoriable (period) costs are expensed in the period in which they are incurred. Thus, none of these costs are assigned to product or appear as part of the reported values of inventories on the balance sheet. In a manufacturing organization, the level of these costs can be significant (often greater than 25 percent of sales revenue), and controlling them may bring greater cost savings than the same effort exercised in controlling production costs. For service organizations, the relative importance of selling and administrative costs depends on the nature of the service produced. Physicians and dentists, for example, do very little marketing and thus have very low selling costs. On the other hand, a grocery chain experimenting with special services such as alternative shopping and delivery technologies may incur substantial marketing costs.