In: Accounting
we explored specifics of health care finance, including cost drivers. in a discussion, define cost driver and explain the characteristics of a good driver as opposed to a poor one
Cost drivers can simply be understood as that which drives the cost. A cost driver is a unit of an activity that drives or causes the costs for that activity. The concept of cost drivers is used when applying activity-based costing. For example, the number of customer orders is the cost driver for ordering costs, i.e, if the number of customer orders is high, then the ordering costs for the company will also be high and vice-versa. Thus, it can also be understood that cost drivers drive variable costs in most cases and they can have a direct or inverse relationship with the costs. Another example of an inverse relationship between activity costs and its cost driver is of numbers of inspections and rework costs. If the number of inspections is increased at the time of manufacturing then the costs of rework after defective manufacturing can be significantly reduced.
The characteristics of a good cost driver over a poor one are as follows:-