Question

Hi-Tek Manufacturing, Inc., makes two types of industrial component parts—the B300 and the T500. An absorption costing income statement for the most recent period is shown:

Hi-Tek Manufacturing Inc. Income Statement
Sales	$	1,708,000
Cost of goods sold		1,216,264
Gross margin		491,736
Selling and administrative expenses		640,000
Net operating loss	$	(148,264	)

Hi-Tek produced and sold 60,200 units of B300 at a price of $20 per unit and 12,600 units of T500 at a price of $40 per unit. The company’s traditional cost system allocates manufacturing overhead to products using a plantwide overhead rate and direct labor dollars as the allocation base. Additional information relating to the company’s two product lines is shown below:

	B300		T500		Total
Direct materials	$	400,300	$	163,000	$	563,300
Direct labor	$	120,400	$	42,100		162,500
Manufacturing overhead						490,464
Cost of goods sold					$	1,216,264

The company has created an activity-based costing system to evaluate the profitability of its products. Hi-Tek’s ABC implementation team concluded that $53,000 and $106,000 of the company’s advertising expenses could be directly traced to B300 and T500, respectively. The remainder of the selling and administrative expenses was organization-sustaining in nature. The ABC team also distributed the company’s manufacturing overhead to four activities as shown below:

	Manufacturing Overhead			Activity
Activity Cost Pool (and Activity Measure)				B300	T500	Total
Machining (machine-hours)	$	201,564		90,300	62,400	152,700
Setups (setup hours)		127,600		79	240	319
Product-sustaining (number of products)		101,200		1	1	2
Other (organization-sustaining costs)		60,100		NA	NA	NA
Total manufacturing overhead cost	$	490,464

Required:

1. Compute the product margins for the B300 and T500 under the company’s traditional costing system.

2. Compute the product margins for B300 and T500 under the activity-based costing system.

3. Prepare a quantitative comparison of the traditional and activity-based cost assignments.

Answer 1