Overhead Costs

Professor Lewis is to be congratulated upon being among the first economists to tackle the tricky subject of controlling the nationalised industries."Financial Times This book analyses some of the difficulties of costing and price formation that arise out of the existence of overhead costs in nationalised industry. Issues such as the law relating to monopoly and the accountability of public enterprise are considered, along with complex questions such as price formation and the problem of policy in public corporations.

Cost Management: Measuring, Monitoring, and Motivating Performance, Third Canadian Edition was written to help students learn to appropriately apply cost accounting methods in a variety of organizational settings. To achieve this goal, students must also develop professional competencies, such as strategic/critical thinking, risk analysis, decision making, ethical reasoning and communication. This is in line with the CPA curriculum and the content of this edition and the problem materials is mapped to the CPA. Many students fail to recognize the assumptions, limitations, behavioural implications, and qualitative factors that influence managerial decision making. The textbook is written in an engaging step-by-step style that is accessible to students. The authors are proactive about addressing the challenges that instructors and students face in their teaching and learning endeavors. They utilize features such as realistic examples, real ethical dilemmas, self-study problems and unique problem material structured to encourage students to think about accounting problems and problem-solving more complexly.

Overhead cost management is an increasingly important issue. As production processes become more automated, labor inputs are reduced yet capital and other overhead costs are increased. Traditional methods of overheadapportionment allocate increasingly large sums of money on the basis of a rapidly decreasing direct cost base. The usefulness of product costs calculated in this way is marginal, and methods to manage and control the total overhead cost burden are imperative. In this text, John Innes and Falconer Mitchell guide the reader through the strengths and limitations of traditional cost management approaches in the current environment. new approaches, such as Activity-Based Costing (ABC), are described and their merits assessed, together with more well known techniques such as Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB), Priority-Based Budgeting, and Target Costing. Whereas in the past cost control could take place on a day-to-day basis because many costs were incurred from day to day, in the modern world much greater reliance has to be placed on product design and production planning. Once a product has been designed and a production process set into operation, the options available for controlling costs become much more limited. Successful cost control now demands a more proactive stance on the part of the manager. This book sets out some of the techniques that are available to help in that task.

In today's hypercompetitive global marketplace, accurate costestimating is crucial to bottom-line results. Nowhere is this moreevident than in the design and development of new products andservices. Among managing engineers responsible for developingrealistic cost estimates for new product designs, the number-onesource of information and guidance has been the Cost Estimator'sReference Manual. Comprehensive, authoritative, and practical, the Manual instructsreaders in the full range of cost estimating techniques andprocedures currently used in the fields of development, testing,manufacturing, production, construction, software, generalservices, government contracting, engineering services, scientificprojects, and proposal preparation. The authors clearly explain howto go about gathering the data essential to preparing a realisticestimate of costs and guide the reader step by step through eachprocedure. This new Second Edition incorporates a decade of progress in themethods, procedures, and strategies of cost estimating. All thematerial has been updated and five new chapters have been added toreflect the most recent information on such increasingly importanttopics as activity-based costing, software estimating,design-to-cost techniques, and cost implications of new concurrentengineering and systems engineering approaches to projects. Indispensable to virtually anyone whose work requires accurate costestimates, the Cost Estimator's Reference Manual will be especiallyvaluable to engineers, estimators, accountants, and contractors ofproducts, projects, processes, and services to both government andindustry. The essential ready-reference for the techniques, methods, andprocedures of cost estimating COST ESTIMATOR'S REFERENCE MANUAL Second Edition Indispensable for anyone who depends on accurate cost estimates forengineering projects, the Cost Estimator's Reference Manual guidesthe user through both the basic and more sophisticated aspects ofthe estimating process. Authoritative and comprehensive, the Manualseamlessly integrates the many functions--accounting, financial,statistical, and management--of modern cost estimating practice.Its broad coverage includes estimating procedures applied to suchareas as: * Production * Software * Development * General services * Testing * Government contracting * Manufacturing * Engineering * Proposal preparation * Scientific projects * Construction This updated and expanded Second Edition incorporates all the mostimportant recent developments in cost estimating, such asactivity-based costing, software estimating, design-to-costtechniques, computer-aided estimating tools, concurrentengineering, and life cycle costing. For engineers, estimators, accountants, planners, and others whoare involved in the cost aspects of projects, the Cost Estimator'sReference Manual is an invaluable information source that will payfor itself many times over.

Management and cost accounting has been the basic toolbox in business administration for decades. Today it is an integral part of all curricula in business education and no student can afford not to be familiar with its basic concepts and instruments. At the same time, business in general, and management accounting in particular, is becoming more and more international. English clearly has evolved as the "lingua franca" of international business. Academics, students as well as practitioners exchange their views and ideas, discuss concepts and communicate with each other in English. This is certainly also true for cost accounting and management accounting. Management Accounting is becoming increasingly international. "Management and Cost Accounting" is a new English language textbook covering concepts and instruments of cost and management accounting at an introductory level (Bachelor, but also suited for MBA courses due to strong focus on practical applications and cases). This textbook covers all topics that are relevant in management accounting in business organizations and that are typically covered in German and Central European Bachelor classes on cost accounting and management accounting. After an introduction to the topic, including major differences between the German approach and the purely Anglo-Saxon approach of management accounting, the book describes different cost terms and concepts applied in German cost accounting, The book is much more specific here compared to US-American standard textbooks. Based on different cost concepts, the topic of cost behavior is discussed, including the determination of cost functions. The heart of the book guides the reader through the general structure of a fully developed cost accounting system following the German and Central European standard: It starts with cost type accounting, moves on to cost center accounting and finally deals with cost unit accounting, assigning cost to goods and services offered in the market. The remaining parts of the book deal with decision making and how management and cost accounting data can support managers in this task. A comparison of absorption costing and variable costing introduces the reader to management decisions such as product portfolio and outsourcing decisions. Additionally, cost-volume-profit analysis (break-even-analysis) is covered. The book closes with a comprehensive treatment of cost planning and variance analysis.