ABC System and service organizations

The ABC system has been taken up as applied to a manufacturing organizations with the same efficiency. One basic characteristic of service organization is that most of the costs in these organization are fixed and indirect. On the other hand in manufacturing organization a significant portion of total cost is direct and is easily traced to a cost object. The overhead cost are relatively smaller. However there are service organization which deal in a variety of production and services and incur quite significant overheads. These overhead cannot easily be traced to individual product and service. For example bank provides a variety of services to the customer. Under ABC system the overhead cost of a bank can be allocated to different activities. Some of the activities and the relevant cost drivers for a bank are given hereunder:

Cost assigned to an activity are then allocated to different production and services on the basis of their demand for the activity and the cost driver is used as a measure of resource consumption.