Free Accounting Dissertations - Critically Discuss The Difference Between Activity Based Costing And
Critically discuss the difference between activity based costing and throughput accounting.
Introduction
Changing external business environment has resulted in further developments in the tools and techniques used for management accounting. Traditional management accounting techniques had certain limitations associated with them, for instance, absorption costing methods have been found to be inappropriate in the modern environment. Similarly, standard costing’ suitability with respect to its general philosophy and detailed operations has come under severe criticism. It is believed that traditional management accounting performance measures can produce the wrong type of response. As a response to the limitations of traditional accounting techniques, activity based approaches has gained significant repute.
The following paper will evaluate the activity based costing approach and attempt to highlight the inherent differences between activity based costing and throughput accounting approach.
In the case of activity based approaches, the focus is on the activities that the business carries out as opposed to how the activities have traditionally been organised into separate functions. Activity based costing was thus developed because it was realised that older methods like absorption costing, which used labour hours as the basis for absorbing overheads, did not provide useful information about the cost drivers, in other words it did not answer for the question what was causing the overheads to be incurred in the first place.
Generally, Activity Based Costing (ABC) is defined as an accounting technique that allows an organization to determine the actual cost associated with each product and service produced by the organization without regard to the organizational structure. Amongst various benefits associated with the ABC approach one of the major ones is that it helps to define the activities of the organisation in terms of value adding activities. In other words, as a result of ABC it is easy to identify which activities add value to the organisation. Identification of non-value adding activities helps in identifying where time, effort and money are being wasted and unnecessary costs being incurred.
The following diagram illustrates the process by which Activity based costing adds value to the business.
Source: ABC costing from resources through activities to objects (Paasovaara 1996).
Advantages associated with activity-based approach are many. More generally it is said that activity based costing recognises the inherent complexities faced by many businesses in the present day, which results in the businesses having multiple cost drivers, many of them are transaction based rather than volume based.. These complexities arise due to businesses now having a broader product range and the business environment in general is more volatile and unpredictable.
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