Question

What is standard costing, and when is it used? Give an example of a well-known company that you think would use standard costing methods and explain why.

Answer 1

Standard costing is an important subtopic of cost accounting. Standard costs are usually associated with a manufacturing company's costs of direct material, direct labor, and manufacturing overhead.

Rather than assigning the actual costs of direct material, direct labor, and manufacturing overhead to a product, many manufacturers assign the expected or standard cost. This means that a manufacturer's inventories and cost of goods sold will begin with amounts reflecting the standard costs, not the actual costs, of a product. Manufacturers, of course, still have to pay the actual costs. As a result there are almost always differences between the actual costs and the standard costs, and those differences are known as variances.

Five of the benefits that result from a business using a standard cost system are:

• Improved cost control.
• More useful information for managerial planning and decision making.
• More reasonable and easier inventory measurements.
• Cost savings in record-keeping.
• Possible reductions in production costs.

More reasonable and easier inventory measurements A standard cost system provides easier inventory valuation than an actual cost system. Under an actual cost system, unit costs for batches of identical products may differ widely. For example, this variation can occur because of a machine malfunction during the production of a given batch that increases the labor and overhead charged to that batch. Under a standard cost system, the company would not include such unusual costs in inventory. Rather, it would charge these excess costs to variance accounts after comparing actual costs to standard costs.

Here is a simple standard costing example. Let’s take a company that makes widgets. Based on historical data, a cost analyst determines that producing one widget typically requires 1 pound of raw material costing $2 dollars and 1 hour of labor costing $20 dollars. These are the standard amounts and costs for materialand labor.

The company expects to produce 1,000 widgets in the upcoming quarter. Based on this sales forecast, and using the standards determined by the costanalyst, the company can plan a budget for the production costs required for the upcoming quarter. The budget includes 1,000 pounds of raw material costing$2,000 dollars and 1,000 hours of labor costing a total of $20,000 dollars. So the total production costs for the upcoming quarter are expected to be $22,000 dollars.

At the end of the quarter, the companyanalyzes the production process to see how well they stuck to the budget. As it turns out, the company produced 1,000 widgets at a total cost of $35,000 dollars. Clearly, the production process turned out to be more expensive than they had planned. The cost analyst can then compare the standard budgeted costs to the actual costs to see what the differences were and then the managers can analyze the production process to find out why the differences occurred.