Cost Accounting for Dummies

Accounting

Author: Kenneth Boyd

ISBN-13: 978-1118453803

Another book that we can highly recommend. One of the problems we have found in many of the businesses we work with is the concept of cost accounting. How do you allocate costs or figure out what something actually costs to produce or sell? If you can't do that, it's easy to make business mistakes and lose money very quickly.

Critical in supporting strategic business decisions and improving profitability, cost accounting is arguably one of the most important functions in the accounting field. Although you are probably not taking a cost accounting course (which this book is written for), you will find the concepts valuable for your business in this easy to understand format. Some of the essential concepts you'll encounter in this book are: how to define costs as direct materials, direct labor, fixed overhead, variable overhead, or period costs; how to use allocation methodology to assign costs to products and services; how to evaluate the need for capital expenditures; how to design a budget model that forecast changes in costs based on expected activity levels; and much more.