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Tuesday, May 12, 2015

The Activity Based Costing (ABC) System

A.   Introduction
Business recently is in uncertain and competitive condition, neither in large or small scale of industries. Every company seems to apply its strategies to win the competition in the market. Therefore, reliable information about cost is very important for decision making. Companies that can effectively gather and spread relevant information to all their departments might be successful to be great companies in the world (Compton, 2009). One thing that should be considered is about efficiency. In order to know how to improve efficiency, companies need to know information related to the costing method implemented to production activities, so they can identify each cost appropriately.
Costs can be divided into direct costs and indirect costs or overheads. Direct costs are easier to be assigned to cost objects than indirect costs because direct costs can easily be traced to particular cost objects, while indirect costs cannot. Assigning process of indirect costs involves cost allocation of resources that are consumed in company activities. There are two costing system that can be applied, direct costing system, which only assigns direct costs to cost objects, and absorption costing system, which assigns direct and indirect costs to cost objects. Absorption costing system can be divided into Traditional Costing Systems and Activity Based Costing (ABC) System (Drury, 2013).