Estimated Factory Overhead Applied
A job’s prime costs are determined from materials requisitions and time tickets Determining the amount of overhead to be charged is more difficult. Some overhead costs, such as rent and insurance, are fixed regardless of the amount of production. Others, such as power and lubricants, will vary with the quantity of production. Overhead costs such as major cleaning and remodeling efforts are intermittent or seasonal; they benefit all production but may be incurred when some jobs are in production and not incurred at all at other times.
To overcome the difficulties of overhead accounting, all overhead costs are distributed over all jobs. The amount charged is in proportion to an activity—such as direct labor usage, machine usage, processing time, material usage, or a combination of two or more of these. As automation increases and the use of direct labor decreases, the activity chosen is less likely to be direct labor hours or direct labor cost and more likely to be