Question

Part A MelSwin is an accounting consultancy firm that provides its services to small, medium and...

Part A

MelSwin is an accounting consultancy firm that provides its services to small, medium and large sized clients. The client size is determined by the number of employees as follows:

Small sized clients

Medium sized clients

Large sized clients

Number of employees

<50

50 to 100

>100

MelSwin uses a traditional overhead cost driver of “data analysis hours” to estimate the cost of providing its services. Although MelSwin does not operate in a competitive environment, the Finance Manager, Grainne, advocates to use advance costing methods like the activity-based costing. Otto, the CEO, argues that the current method provides an acceptable cost estimation and given the high cost of implementing ABC, it will not beneficial. However, he agreed to hire a university graduate to examine the costs and benefits of implementing ABC. To do so, Mary, a recent Swinburne graduate, has been hired to establish an activity-based costing system. The activities and associated costs are estimated as follows:

Activity

Activity cost

Activity driver

Quantity of activity driver

Visiting small sized clients

45,000

Number of small sized clients

20

Visiting medium sized clients

120,000

Number of medium sized clients

50

Visiting large sized clients

150,000

Number of large sized clients

60

Data collection

200,000

Number of hours

10,000

Data analysis

800,000

Number of hours

20,000

Report Writing

50,000

Number of words

1,000,000

Printing

10,000

Number of papers

50,000

Correcting errors

10,000

Number of errors

50

Total cost

1,385,000

Mary has collected the following information about the average activity usage of three groups of clients:

Activity

small sized client

medium sized client

large sized client

Data collection

55

70

90

Data analysis

120

142

175

Report Writing

5500

7000

9000

Printing

200

320

500

Correcting errors

0.2

0.32

0.5

Mary has also collected the following information about a client, Hawthorn Cabinet, with 60 employees.

Activity

Quantity

Data collection

65

Data analysis

122

Report Writing

6,952

Printing

321

Correcting errors

0

Mary has been asked to prepare a report about the implementation of ABC and answer some relevant questions.

Part B

Mary has also become responsible to prepare cash budgets for the next six months. 15 % of the clients are small sized, 40% medium sized and the rest are large sized.

The patterns of billing receipts for each group of clients are presented as follows:

Small sized clients

Medium sized clients

Large sized clients

During month of service

30%

30%

20%

During month following service

70%

40%

40%

During second month following service

30%

40%

Estimated billings for the last six months of this year are listed below.

Month

Estimated billings

July

140000

August

130000

September

145000

October

150000

November

180000

December

120000

Estimated cash outflows for the last three months of this year are listed below.

Month

Estimated cash outflows

October

100000

November

140000

December

85000


MelSwin expects to have a cash balance of $50,000 on 1 October and has a policy of maintaining a minimum cash balance of $40,000 at the end of each month.

Mary has been asked to prepare a cash budget report for the next six months including answering some relevant questions.

Do you recommend using the activity-based costing at MelSwin? Briefly explain your reason.

Homework Answers

Answer #1

Activity-based costing is often practiced in the production industry because it improves the security of cost data, originating almost real costs including more beneficial analyzing the costs acquired by the firm while its manufacturing process.

I can say Yes, I recommend practicing the ABC at MelSwin. Because of the total cost of service following ABC-Activity-Based Costing method which is more moderate than the method Traditional Costing.

The traditional method of costing computes a medium overhead price to the direct costs of producing goods and is suitably done during the overhead of a firm is moderately associated with the direct costs of production. ABC-Activity-based costing recognizes each of the particular overhead actions compared to the production of a specific product.

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