Cost accounting involves the techniques for:
1. determining the costs of products, processes, projects, etc. in order to report the correct amounts on the financial statements, and
2. assisting management in making decisions and in the planning and control of an organization.
For example, cost accounting is used to compute the unit cost of a manufacturer’s products in order to report the cost of inventory on its balance sheet and the cost of goods sold on its income statement. This is achieved with techniques such as the allocation of manufacturing overhead costs and through the use of process costing, operations costing, and job-order costing systems.
Cost accounting had its roots in manufacturing businesses, but today it extends to service businesses. For example, a bank will use cost accounting to determine the cost of processing a customer’s check and/or a deposit. This in turn may provide management with guidance in the pricing of these services.
While cost accounting is often used within a company to aid in decision making, financial accounting is what the outside investor community typically sees. Financial accounting is a different representation of costs and financial performance that includes a company’s assets and liabilities. Cost accounting can be most beneficial as a tool for management in budgeting and in setting up cost control programs, which can improve net margins for the company in the future.
One key difference between cost accounting and financial accounting is that while in financial accounting the cost is classified depending on the type of transaction, cost accounting classifies costs according to information needs of the management.
Types of Cost Accounting
This type of cost accounting uses ratios to compare efficient uses of labor and materials to produce goods or services under standard conditions. Assessing these differences is called a variance analysis. Traditional cost accounting essentially allocates cost based on one measure, labor or machine hours. Due to the fact that overhead cost has risen proportionate to labor cost since the genesis of standard cost accounting, allocating overhead cost as an overall cost has ended up producing occasionally misleading insights.
An approach to the costing and monitoring of activities which involves tracing resource consumption and costing final outputs, resources assigned to activities, and activities to cost objects based on consumption estimates.
Activity based costing accumulates the overheads from each department and assigns them to specific cost objects like services, customers, or products. The way these costs are assigned to cost objects are first decided in an activity analysis, where appropriate output measures are cost drivers. As result, activity based costing tends to be much more accurate and helpful when it comes to helping managers understand the cost and profitability of their company’s specific services or products. Accountants using activity based costing will pass out a survey to employees who will then account for the amount of time they spend on different tasks. This gives management a better idea of where their time and money is being spent.
Most accounting practices for manufacturing work off the assumption that whatever is being produced is done in a large scale. Instead of using standard costing, activity based costing, cost-plus pricing, or other management accounting systems, when using lean accounting those methods are replaced by value-based pricing and lean-focused performance measurements
Considered a simplified model of cost accounting, marginal costing is an analysis of the relationship between a product or service’s sales price, the volume of sales, the amount produced, expenses, costs and profits. That specific relationship is called the contribution margin.This type of analysis can be used by management to gain insight on potential profits as impacted by changing costs, what types of sales prices to establish, and types of marketing campaigns.
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