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	$	1,703,300
Cost of goods sold		1,216,943
Gross margin		486,357
Selling and administrative expenses		640,000
Net operating loss	$	(153,643	)

Hi-Tek produced and sold 60,400 units of B300 at a price of $20 per unit and 12,700 units of T500 at a price of $39 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	$	400,800	$	162,000	$	562,800
Direct labor	$	120,900	$	42,200		163,100
Manufacturing overhead						491,043
Cost of goods sold					$	1,216,943

The company has created an activity-based costing system to evaluate the profitability of its products. Hi-Tek’s ABC implementation team concluded that $58,000 and $110,000 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)	$	203,623		90,300	62,800	153,100
Setups (setup hours)		126,420		74	220	294
Product-sustaining (number of products)		101,000		1	1	2
Other (organization-sustaining costs)		60,000		NA	NA	NA
Total manufacturing overhead cost	$	491,043

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