Amba 630

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PREMIER PRODUCTS, INC.

Premier Products, Inc. manufactures tennis rackets. Premier Products has grown extensively over the past two years. While the company has been very profitable, President Mark Harrison is concerned with its ability to cost products accurately. Some products appear to be very profitable while others, which should be showing a profit, seem to be losing money. The production manager is convinced that his production processes are as efficient as any in the industry, and he is unable to explain the apparent high cost of producing some of the products.

Harrison agreed with his production manager and is convinced that the cost accounting system is at fault. He has hired Tom Arnold, a management consultant, to analyze the firm's costing system. Arnold has documented the existing costing system. It is a very simple system that uses a single allocation rate for all overhead costs. The overhead rate for the year is determined by adding together the budgeted variable and fixed overhead costs and dividing this sum by the number of budgeted labor hours. The standard cost of a product is found by multiplying the number of direct labor hours required to manufacture that product by the overhead rate and adding this quantity to the direct labor and material costs.

Arnold is convinced that the company's costing system is partially to blame for some of the firm's problems. He has assembled data for four of Premier's products. He has put together the actual costs required for each of these products in Table A. These costs will serve as the benchmark against which the results of different allocation schemes can be evaluated.

Of course, in real life we could never start out with accurate actual costs - accurate actual costs would be the end result that we would attempt to determine. But we provide this information as a learning aid to help you to clearly understand the key issues. Table A is as follows:

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