Stages in activity based costing

The different stages in activity based costing are listed below and are shown in figure below.

1) Identification of the activities that may take place in an organization: usually the numbers of cost centers that a traditional overhead system uses are quite small say upto fifteen. In ABC the number of activities will be much more say 200 the exact number will depend on how the management subdivides the organization s activities it is possible to break the organization down into many very small activities. But if ABC is acceptable as practical system it is necessary to use larger grouping so that say 40 activities may be used in practice. The additional number of activities over cost centers means that ABC should be more accurate than traditional method regardless of anything else.

2) Assigning costs to cost pool for each activity : both support and primary activities that caused them. This creates cost pools or cost buckets his will be using resource cost drivers that reflect causality.

3) Support activities are then spread across the primary activities : on some suitable base, which reflects the use of the support activity. This is based on the factor that drives the consumption of the activity. The based is the cost driver that is the measures of how support activity are used.

4) Determine the cost driver for each activity : that will be used to relate the overheads collected in the cost pools to the cost objects this is based on the factor that drives the consumption of the activity. The question to ask is - what causes the activity to incur costs? In production scheduling for example the driver will maybe be the number of batches ordered.

5) Assigning the cost of activities to products according to product demand for activities : this requires to calculate cost driver rate for each activity just as an overheats absorption rate would be calculated in the traditional system.

The activity driver rate can be used to cost products as in traditional absorption costing but it can also cost other cost objects like customers\ customer segments and distribution channels. The possibility of costing objects other than products is part of the advantage of ABC. The activity cost driver rates will be multiplied by the dissimilar amounts of each activity that each product / other cost object consumes.