Читать книгу Cost Accounting For Dummies - Kenneth W. Boyd - Страница 98

To allocate indirect costs, you decide on two cost pools. One pool is your vehicle and equipment costs, and includes depreciation, maintenance, repair, and insurance costs. The other pool is office cost, which includes salary, benefits, accounting costs, and legal costs for your company. The cost object for allocating these indirect costs is the customer base:

Vehicle and equipment costs	$4,000
Office cost	$7,000
Customers serviced	200

After you resolve how to allocate costs, try to keep it simple. You combine the indirect costs into one amount ($4,000 + $7,000 = $11,000). You then divide the indirect cost total by the number of clients for the month:

 Indirect cost allocation rate = $11,000 ÷ 200 customers = $55 per customer

 Indirect cost allocation rate = $55 per customer

Your office assistant asks a question: “Is that really fair? What if one client has a $3,000 job, and another’s project is only $500? Should we be charging the same amount of costs to both?” You think about the issue over lunch.

After lunch, you stop by your office assistant’s desk and say: “You know, a client should expect that if we show up for a job of any size we’re going to incur some office and vehicle costs. I don’t think a client will be surprised by those fees.”

The assistant thinks for a minute. “Yeah, that’s fair. If they showed up at my house for a job, those indirect costs seem okay. I guess I’d expect to pay for it somehow. As long as the cost charged to a small job is not huge, I think charging a rate per customer is reasonable.”

The discussion with your office assistant may convince you that your indirect cost allocation should be more specific. If you could show the client how their specific job generated indirect costs, he or she would be more inclined to agree with your billing.

You need to weigh the cost and time needed to allocate costs with the benefit of knowing more specific information. If customers generally accept the $55 allocation rate as reasonable, great. Probably no reason to dig further into your indirect costs.

If the majority of your customers have a problem with the rate, you should consider more detailed analysis and present a more detailed indirect cost billing. If not, you may lose the opportunity to do more work with the same group of clients.