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Looking for a practical, proven method to gain that crucial competitive edge for your company? It’s as simple as ABC. Activity-based costing (ABC) is a decision support tool that gives you that needed edge through a greater understanding of your product and process costs. In Activity-Based Costing: Making It Work for Small and Mid-Sized Companies, practicing accountant Douglas T. Hicks guides you through the process of adopting ABC and using it to improve the quality of your business’s decisions. Traditionally, cost accounting methods have been designed to determine the inventory value and cost of sales for an entire organization—seldom providing accurate or relevant information for individual products or services. However, with ABC, businesses can now see dramatic improvements in both accuracy and relevance when measuring product and process costs. Decisions based on this improved cost information will guide the business to an improved competitive position, both domestically and globally. If your company has between twenty and five hundred employees, it can greatly benefit from ABC without an overhaul of its current cost information systems. Using an approach developed while solving problems for small and midsized companies, Douglas Hicks helps you sharpen your competitive edge while emphasizing the "total package" of cost information—not just its computational aspects—and steers you clear of the dangers encountered by measuring costs using generally accepted accounting principles. The result is a reader-accessible, comprehensive narrative covering every ABC element, including clearly defined instructions for building a cost accumulation and distribution model for any size business. In this indispensable reference, Mr. Hicks discusses the logic of ABC and its cost flow-down steps, then clearly demonstrates the most appropriate ways for your business to change to multiple costing rates and bases. The ABC system is used to perform "what if" analyses, while several case studies are presented on developing cost flowdown structures. And by simply outlining the relationship between decision costing and long-term contracts, he easily illustrates which small and mid-sized businesses can benefit the most from ABC. Owners, managers, controllers, accountants, and any executive involved with small and mid-sized companies will appreciate this book’s practical, down-to-earth ABC methods. Its tested and proven theories and methods will help businesses of any size profit, by basing their decisions on facts, not fantasies. Activity-based costing is no longer an option when striving for the competitive edge in business—it is now a requirement. Even educators will find ways to incorporate ABC into existing cost accounting courses with this insightful and timely book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.