Question

Green Thumb Gardening is a small gardening service that uses activity-based costing to estimate costs for pricing and other purposes. The proprietor of the company believes that costs are driven primarily by the size of customer lawns, the size of customer garden beds, the distance to travel to customers, and the number of customers. In addition, the costs of maintaining garden beds depends on whether the beds are low maintenance beds (mainly ordinary trees and shrubs) or high maintenance beds (mainly flowers and exotic plants). Accordingly, the company uses the five activity cost pools listed below:

Activity Cost Pool	Activity Measure
Caring for lawn	Square feet of lawn
Caring for garden beds–low maintenance	Square feet of low maintenance beds
Caring for garden beds–high maintenance	Square feet of high maintenance beds
Travel to jobs	Miles
Customer billing and service	Number of customers

The company already has completed its first stage allocations of costs and has summarized its annual costs and activity as follows:

  

Activity Cost Pool	Estimated Overhead Cost		Expected Activity
Caring for lawn	$	87,400	175,000	square feet of lawn
Caring for garden beds–low maintenance	$	40,000	29,000	square feet of low maintenance beds
Caring for garden beds–high maintenance	$	62,330	23,000	square feet of high maintenance beds
Travel to jobs	$	3,400	20,000	miles
Customer billing and service	$	7,100	28	customers

Required:

Compute the activity rate for each of the activity cost pools. (Round your answers to 2 decimal places.)

Caring for lawn (per sq ft of laawn)

Caring for garden bed-low maintenance (per sq ft of low maintenance bed)

Caring for garden bed-high maintenance (per sq ft of high maintenance bed)

Travel to jobs (per mile)

Customer billing service (per customer)

Answer 1

Answer-

Computation of activity rate for each of the activity cost pools

Activity Cost Pool	Estimated overhead cost $	Expected Activity	Calculation	Activity Rate
Caring for lawn	$87400	175000 square feet of lawn	$87400/175000	$0.50 per square ft of lawn
Caring for garden beds-low maintenance	$40000	29000 square feet of low maintenance beds	$40000/29000	$1.38 per square ft of low maintenance beds
Caring for garden beds-        high maintenance	$62330	23000 square feet of high maintenance beds	$62330/23000	$2.71 per square ft of high maintenance beds
Travel to jobs	$3400	20000 miles	$3400/20000	$0.17 per mile
Customer billing                  and service                     $7100                 28 customers             $7100/28          $253.57 per customer

Where

Activity Rate =   Estimated Overhead Cost $ / Expected Activity