There are overhead costs in virtually every type of business. What are some of the overhead costs at your company or a company that you are familiar with? Describe some of the overhead costs and see if you can find out how the overhead is calculated, allocated, and applied...or how you think they should be calculated, allocated, and applied.
Determining appropriate product costs is essential to reporting a reliable inventory valuation. Fraud examiners have indicated that scams that involve product costs and expenses are relatively easy to detect. Based on our readings and, possibly, your experience, discuss some ways in which you think accounting fraud could be committed through product costing.
Have you ever worked in a company that utilized activity based costing, standard costing, a Just-In-Time operating environment, or any of the other costing concepts covered in our readings during this module? Describe your experience with any of these managerial philosophies and your opinion on their effectiveness.
In what fundamental ways is activity based costing different from traditional costing methods such as job order costing? Please make sure you address why direct labor is a poor base for allocating in many companies. Provide an example for a product where direct labor is not appropriate.
Have you ever been involved in the budget process at your organization? Describe your role and responsibilities. If you've never been involved in the budget process at your organization, discuss why (or why not) you would want to be responsible for the budget.
Current events in business affecting financial reporting or performance measurements are tied to financial measurements. Provide the URL of a short article online and describe how the company you researched is affected by its financial reporting issue.
Discuss one measure of performance of a company and indicate what the significance of a lower or higher level of such measure is. Compare it next to a second measure and explain the significance of the second measure. Finally, explain which of the two criteria is more important and why.
Some companies have created controversy over the decision to outsource major activities to companies based in other countries. The decision to outsource should begin with an analysis of the cost. What is your opinion of outsourcing? Should outsourcing be exclusively a cost decision or should the human aspect be weighed into the decision?
Often when deciding to implement a capital investment decision, funding through acquiring debt must be obtained. Recently the credit market has been tight to non-existent. Using the information in our text and any external research you conduct, describe how companies are dealing with the problem of not being able to obtain loans to implement capital investment plans.