ABC（Activity Based Cost)¶
定义¶
Activity based costing (ABC) is an accounting methodology that assigns costs to activities rather than products or services. This enables resources and overhead costs to be more accurately assigned to the products and the services that consume them. ABC is a systematic, cause-and-effect method of assigning the cost of activities of products, services, customers, or any cost object.
ABC is based on the principle that ‘products consume activities.’ Traditional cost systems allocate costs based on direct labour, material costs, revenue or other simplistic methods. As a result, traditional systems tend to over-cost high volume products, services, and customers; and under-cost low volume.
Conventional costing systems are built on the assumption that product drives the costs directly. ABC system drives indirect and support expenses, first to the activities and processes and then to products, services, and customers, giving managers a clearer picture of economics of their operations and services.
传统的成本计算系统是建立在产品直接驱动成本的假设之上的。ABC系统驱动间接和支持费用，首先是活动和过程，然后是产品、服务和客户，使经理对他们的经营和服务的经济情况有一个更清晰的画面。
Activities can be defined as a named process, function, or task that occurs over time and has recognized results. Activities use up assigned resources to produce products and services. Inputs are transformed into outputs under the parameters set by controls performed by the organization’s employees and their tools.
活动可以定义为已命名的过程、功能或随时间发生并已确认结果的任务。活动使用分配的资源来生产产品和服务。输入在组织员工及其工具执行的控制设置的参数下转换为输出。
Activities can be perceived as consumers of resources in production of materials, services, events, or information. Activities are the common denominator between business process improvement and information improvement.
活动可以被看作是生产材料、服务、事件或信息的资源的消费者。活动是业务流程改进和信息改进之间的共同特征。
Cost accounting centers around recognizing and reporting costs in different ways. Accountants use different costing methods to meet different financial-reporting goals, such as deferring expenses until future periods or maximizing reported net income. Functional-based and activity-based cost accounting offer two fundamentally different frameworks for recognizing and reporting company expenses. Neither system is better than the other in every situation. Rather, the ideal costing system to use depends on your company’s financial situation and cash-flow and reporting goals.
ABC与传统成本核算的差异： https://commerceiets.com/difference-between-traditional-costing-and-activity-based-costing/
ABC compared to Functional-based costing¶
Activity-Based Costing
Activity-based costing (ABC) allocates expenses based on activities performed. Rather than adding all costs incurred in a single department, ABC breaks departmental workflows down into component tasks. Activity-based costing considers both resource drivers, such as the time and space required for each task, as well as activity drivers, such as the number of units produced or customers served, to determine the cost-efficiency of different activities. The ABC system pegs overhead costs directly to specific activities based on the actual amount of each fixed expense they incur. If an activity requires 10 hours of electricity, for example, accountants can easily determine an exact amount of electric utility expense incurred by the activity.
Functional-Based Costing
Functional costs are made up of the total costs of all activities performed by a functional unit. Functional-based costing considers total expenses incurred at the departmental, business-unit, work-group or individual level. Functional-based cost budgets for departments, for example, will include costs incurred by every activity performed in that department. In functional-based costing, accountants assign fixed costs such as manufacturing overhead to output on a per-unit basis.
Advantages
Activity-based costing can be advantageous when analyzing the profitability or income contribution of different activities in an organization. A company can use activity-based cost figures to compare the cost of performing certain functions in-house, like shipping logistics, to the cost of outsourcing the activity.
Functional-based costing can be better-suited to providing big-picture overviews of company expenses. Functional-based cost data can reveal whether a company is generally proficient or poor at managing its expenses, which can be more useful for short-term investors.
Disadvantages
Activity-based costing can be more time-consuming and prone to human error than functional-based costing. In order to determine the cost of single activity, accountants must consider compensation costs, materials costs and overhead costs to come up with a single activity cost, tripling the amount of research required.
The disadvantage of functional-based costing led to the creation of ABC. Functional-based costing cannot provide the type of insights that ABC can reveal for internal decision-making.
仿真模型¶
https://cloud.anylogic.com/model/1aa9a167-bc87-441e-ab54-d31a3234245f?mode=SETTINGS
