Fundamentals of COST ACCOUNTING

ACTIVITY- BASED COSTING

The manager of the Personnel Department at City Enterprises has been reading about time-driven ABC and wants to apply it to her department. She has identified four basic activities her employees spend most of the their time on: Interviewing, Hiring, Assessment, and Separation Processing. The department employs five staff who perform these activities. The manager provides the following estimates for the amount of time it takes to complete each of these activities:

Interviewing: 65 minutes.

Hiring: 70 minutes.

Assessment: 95 minutes.

Separation Processing: 100 minutes.

Employees in Personnel work 37-hour weeks with four weeks for vacation. Of the 37 hours, five are reserved for administrative tasks, training, and so on. The costs of the Personnel Department, including any allocated costs from other staff functions, are $1,663,200. During the year, Personnel conducted 1,220 interviews, made 385 hires, made 3,400 assessments, and had 290 separations.

The manager of the Personnel Department decides that her estimate of the activities might be too simple in two ways. First, the time to interview depends on the level of the position for which a candidate is sought. She estimates that for a candidate at the manager level, the additional interviewing time is 140 minutes. (Personnel Department employees only conduct the initial interview, but they accompany the candidate for interviews by the hiring executive or CEO.) For a candidate at the executive level, the additional time for interviewing is 410 minutes (in addition to the time required for a manager).

The second issue she identified is that the time for separation processing depends on whether the separation is voluntary. She estimates that an involuntary separation requires an additional 230 minutes of personnel time.

Required:

a. What is the total time required for the interviewing activity?

b. What is the total time required for the separation processing activity?

c. What is the cost of interviewing a manager? An executive? (Round intermediate calculations and final answer to 2 decimal places.)

d. What is the cost of a voluntary separation? An involuntary separation? (Round intermediate calculations and final answer to 2 decimal places.)