Activity-Based Costing and its later development into Activity

Based Budgeting and Management

Table of contents

1. Introduction 3

2. Main arguments of Johnson and Kaplan in "Relevance Lost" 3

3. Subsequent treatment of the topic in academic publications 6

A. The first enhancements 6

B. The upcoming of activity-based management (ABM) 7

C. The development of activity-based budgeting (ABB) 8

D. Recent trend: time-driven ABC 8

E. Criticism 9

4. Impact of activity-based costing on companies 9

5. Conclusion 11

6. References 12

2

1. Introduction

Every accounting student of the past sixty years has learned about inventory costing- a bookkeeping procedure

that manufacturing accountants follow to separate the production expense of an accounting period from the cost

of manufactured product inventories at the end of the period.

(Johnson and Kaplan, 1991, p. 130)

This technique of valuing inventory should, although often practiced, not be used for mana-

gerial decision making though. It oversimplifies the consumption of overhead costs by

products, services and customers and therefore leads to distorted cost information.

Activity-based costing (ABC), developed by single manufacturing firms in the early 1980s,

seems to provide more reliable information. The second part of this work describes the

concept of ABC by summarizing the arguments of two pioneers in this field. In their book

"Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting", first published in 1987, H.

Thomas Johnson and Robert S. Kaplan (1991) examine the traditions of management account-

ting and describe possible improvements. In part three the developments of ABC in the last 20

years are described by reviewing a choice of important literature. Part four then shows the

impact that ABC had on implementing companies. The conclusion, part five, contains an

assessment of the used literature and an evaluation of whether the critic of traditional

management accounting has been overcome by ABC.

2. Main arguments of Johnson and Kaplan in "Relevance Lost"

Johnson and Kaplan argue that a good cost system has to fulfil four functions (1991, p.228,

citing Dearden 1967):

i. providing information for the preparation of financial statements

ii. allow managers to control the processes within a company

iii. calculate long- and short-term product costs

iv. produce data that can be used for special studies1

Reviewing business practice and the management accounting research of the 19th and 20th

century the authors say that the design of cost systems in the late 1980′s first and foremost

1 Johnson and Kaplan (1991, p. 228) argue that those special studies nearly always require special data. Building

a standardised cost system on those situational requirements does not seem appropriate. The authors therefore do

not go into further detail in this respect.

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