Managers need to assign costs to products to facilitate external financial reporting and internal decision making. This chapter illustrates an absorption costing approach to calculating product costs known as process costing. | Process Costing Chapter 04 McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2012 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Chapter 4: Process Costing Managers need to assign costs to products to facilitate external financial reporting and internal decision making. This chapter illustrates an absorption costing approach to calculating product costs known as process costing. Similarities Between Job-Order and Process Costing Both systems assign material, labor, and overhead costs to products and they provide a mechanism for computing unit product costs. Both systems use the same manufacturing accounts, including Manufacturing Overhead, Raw Materials, Work in Process, and Finished Goods. The flow of costs through the manufacturing accounts is basically the same in both systems. Job-order and process costing are similar in that they both deal with assigning materials, labor, and overhead to products as a way to calculate the unit product cost. Both systems use Raw Materials Inventory, Work in | Process Costing Chapter 04 McGraw-Hill/Irwin Copyright © 2012 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Chapter 4: Process Costing Managers need to assign costs to products to facilitate external financial reporting and internal decision making. This chapter illustrates an absorption costing approach to calculating product costs known as process costing. Similarities Between Job-Order and Process Costing Both systems assign material, labor, and overhead costs to products and they provide a mechanism for computing unit product costs. Both systems use the same manufacturing accounts, including Manufacturing Overhead, Raw Materials, Work in Process, and Finished Goods. The flow of costs through the manufacturing accounts is basically the same in both systems. Job-order and process costing are similar in that they both deal with assigning materials, labor, and overhead to products as a way to calculate the unit product cost. Both systems use Raw Materials Inventory, Work in Process Inventory, and Finished Goods Inventory. The flow of costs is similar, but not exactly the same, in the two systems. Differences Between Job-Order and Process Costing Process costing: Is used when a single product is produced on a continuing basis or for a long period of time. Job-order costing is used when many different jobs having different production requirements are worked on each period. Systems accumulate costs by department. Job-order costing systems accumulated costs by individual jobs. Systems compute unit costs by department. Job-order costing systems compute unit costs by job on the job cost sheet. Process costing is best suited for the production of a single product that is continuously produced for a long period of time. Recall the mixing and bottling of Coca-Cola from Chapter Three. Job-order costing is best suited when jobs are produced as discrete projects. For example, building a house. Process costing accumulates costs by department, while job-order costing .
