Homework - Budgeting & Variable Costing

1. Master budgets - First Steps

You are the accountant for this start-up company, and you are asked to create a master budget.

What are the steps you would take in creating a master budget?

2. Master budgets

The owner of this same company says that the production capacity of the manufacturing is 200 units. Historical past data says that each unit costs about $25 in labor, $20 in materials, and $10 in overhead. Although capacity is 200, the company has never sold more than 100 units. Here's the first quarter sales from last year:

January 75

February 88

March 92

The owner is quite positive that sales are going to exceed these number by 10%.

What is your suggestion in terms of a production budget?

3. Considering each unit will sell for $100, what is the expected cash budget going to be for the first quarter of this year?

4. The $10 in overhead above in # 2 can be broken down into $6 fixed and $4 variable. The owner found out about variable costing.

He asks you to explain it and give an example of how we are going to treat product cost between the ordinary absorption costing and variable costing. He says we can reduce our income even more if we move to variable costing for our GAAP and tax returns.

What is your response? What's your example? What is the importance of variable costing?

5. In preparing a master budget, how prudent would it be to start on the production side where the production budget drives sales?  Does this occur in real business?