Most people think that business involves decisions around selling more stuff or spending less money, and accountants would typically record the results of these types of activity in a profit and loss or net income statement, but is this enough to ensure enterprises achieve sustained profitable growth?
Consider the following questions…
1. Is the way you compute and measure product and service costs and profitability affecting your organization’s ability to make informed decisions?
2. Do you know exactly what employees are actually doing to create and improve value?
People think by comparisons. So let me give you an analogy. I am a big fan of movies – old black and white ones, new ones with special effects, and most types in between. I especially like musicals. One of my favorite musical films is West Side Story, released in 1961. A few years ago Stephen Spielberg directed an updated version of the movie.
The rate of change impacting many of our enterprises and industries continues to escalate. Of the many jobs within our organisations, one in particular has become much more demanding. It’s the role of the CFO. The person responsible for ensuring the organisation they serve is growing both sustainably and profitably.
So then, how do CFOs decide who to hire into their finance organisations to meet and overcome these challenges?
Time Driven Activity Based Costing is a costing method that uses the time required to complete each step in a process to produce a product or deliver a service. The cost of a product or service is determined by multiplying the total time required to complete a series of process steps by the capacity cost rate, whereas the capacity cost rate (expressed as a cost per unit of time) is determined by the total cost of capacity supplied (such costs include personnel; benefits; management; occupancy; utilities; equipment costs; and allocated indirect and overhead spending) divided by the practical capacity of resources (expressed using a unit of time) within a given time period.
