Читать книгу Cost Accounting For Dummies - Kenneth W. Boyd - Страница 33

Direct costs are costs you can trace (or tie) to your product or service. Indirect costs can’t be traced directly to the product or service. Instead, indirect costs are allocated. (Indirect costs are also referred to as overhead costs.)

Material and labor costs are good examples of direct costs. Say you manufacture cotton gloves. You buy cotton, yarn, and leather to make the gloves. You can trace the materials directly to the gloves; for example, you can take a glove apart and see the materials that were used to create it. Cotton, yarn, and leather are considered direct material costs, because they can be directly tied to one unit of product.

You pay workers to cut, sew, and dye the materials. Because you can trace the hourly labor cost directly to the gloves, these costs are direct labor costs. You can review each employee time sheet and determine how many hours each employee worked, and how many gloves he or she moved through production.

Indirect costs can’t be traced directly to a product or service. So instead, they have to be allocated. You typically allocate costs by assigning a cost per unit. The per-unit rate attaches all the indirect costs to your products. The term overhead is also used to describe indirect costs.