Activity-Based Costing Practice. An Overview (PDF)

Studienarbeit aus dem Jahr 2019 im Fachbereich BWL - Controlling, Note: 1,7, Universität Osnabrück, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Activity-based costing (ABC) is one of the most recent achievements of modern accounting theory. Therefore it has not been researched on immediately through the 1980s and 1990s. There also have been several problems with the implementation of ABC. The methodology of ABC evolved to be applicable more efficiently and flexible. Given that information, nowadays we come to the question, what kind of development ABC went through and which benefits are coming alongside to those recent changes.

The intention is to give the reader an overview about ABC as a new costing system in general, to understand the methodology behind ABC and to give a basis for a discussion on the latest changes of its systematics. One of the most recent tidings, when it comes to the methodology of ABC, is the Time-Driven ABC (TDABC) by Kaplan and Anderson (2007). This new systematic shall also be researched more-over in this work, to analyze and compare its applicability to the early ABC system. This will hopefully create a basis for additional critical discussions on this topic.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next chapter the reader will be given a basic understanding of how ABC works in general and in comparison to other "traditional" accounting methods. Afterwards there will be an analysis on the survey "[...] of Activity-Based Costing in the U.K.'s largest Companies" made by J. Innes and F. Mitchell in 1994. The Analysis will focus on outlining the results to create a frame for the beginning of the application of ABC. Having that frame there will be a short discussion to ensure a comparison to the state of the art. The fourth chapter will outline that state of the art. It will depict the development of the adoption and the areas which ABC has been used for and brief the reader about the TDABC. The last chapter will on the one side conclude the results of this work and on the other side it will depict the potential of future research.