Departmental Overhead Rates and Product Costing
Upon allocating all support service costs to producing departments, an overhead rate can be computed for each department. This rate is computed by adding the allocated service costs to the overhead cost that are directly traceable to the producing department and dividing this total by some measure of activity, such as direct labor hours or machine hours. Cornerstone 7.6 shows how and why to use the allocated support department costs to develop department overhead rates.