The purpose of cost allocation is to link a cost or a group of costs with one or more cost objectives based on the idea of cost causation (the cost objective is the cause or at least partially the cause of the cost, when looking at cost tracing and allocation, organization owners need to determine how closely to allocate individual costs, hence, facilities costs for the support area cost centers are also recovered through the facilities allocation process. It is a significant step to start charging back the cost of occupancy.

Respective Project

Once a project schedule is created, it will usually have to be altered to avoid over-allocating a particular resource (for instance, a subcontractor), which will cause the schedule to be held up, allocate the costs from the applicable overhead cost centers in the normal manner to the cost center showing a credit balance. In summary, apportionment of service organization cost to production and other service organizations facilitates control of the uses made of the services rendered to respective organizations.

Complicated Type

Cost accumulation for planning and control involves accumulating costs by various responsibility centers (e.g, production organization) within your organization for planning and control uses, defined as a type of indirect costs (e.g, general and administrative costs) that can be identified specifically with a service organization or function, or that directly benefit or are incurred by reason of a service organization or function. More than that, once you include indirect costs into the mix, things get more complicated.

Direct Labor

At the program or organization level, it basically means setting up budgeting and accounting systems in a way that allows program managers to determine a unit cost or cost per unit of service, unlike a cost rating, the allocation is less concerned with the actual amount of the cost, and more concerned with allocating or assigning the cost to the correct unit within your organization. In addition, most organizations use direct labor hours or machine hours to allocate overhead costs.

Respective Process

Process costing is methodology used to allocate the total costs of production to homogenous units produced via a continuous process that usually involves multiple steps or organizations, it involves a complex process that entails how and where to allocate revenues in order to ensure the viability of organizations and maintain the operating structure of your organization. And also, in allocation, the entire amount of the cost will have to be allocated to one organization, and in apportionment proportions of the costs will have to be divided among respective cost centers.

Goods Resource

You can set up allocation rules, create basis and offset methods for akin rules, and prorate amounts using akin methods, traditionally, the human resource organization has been regarded as a cost center, or fee burner, then, allocation in economics is an analysis of how limited resources, also called factors of production, are distributed among producers, and how scarce goods and services are divided among consumers.

Use the direct, step-down, and reciprocal allocation methods to allocate service organization costs to user organizations, therefore, allocation of overheads means charging all the amount of cost to a particular organization or cost centre. Also, organizations use cost allocation to ensure that costs are shared equitably across different funding sources and programs.

Realistic planning of finances is key to the implementation of a project or programme, best practice organizations use a cost allocation model that uses quantifiable data to allocate costs and generate line of business financial reports, also, well as in other branches of the economy, the indirect cost allocation process is performed by using supplementation (classical form).

Want to check how your Cost allocation Processes are performing? You don’t know what you don’t know. Find out with our Cost allocation Self Assessment Toolkit:

store.theartofservice.com/Cost-allocation-toolkit