COST DRIVER DEFINITION

Doing this helps to get a better grasp on costs, allowing companies to form a more appropriate pricing strategy and churn out higher profits. Activity cost drivers include direct labor hours, the cost of warehousing, order frequency, and product returns. Using cost drivers simplifies the allocation of manufacturing overhead. The correct allocation of manufacturing overhead is important to determine the true cost of a product. Internal management uses the cost of a product to determine the prices of the products they produce. For this reason, the selection of accurate cost drivers has a direct impact on the profitability and operations of an entity. When a factory machine requires periodic maintenance, the cost of the maintenance is allocated to the products produced by the machine.

Since preparing car bodies is a fairly labor intensive operation, an increase in wages can drastically increase the cost of theactivity. The number of customers is a significant driver for most companies that provide services to their customers.

What Is an Activity Cost Driver?

The Structured Query Language comprises several different data cost driver meaning types that allow it to store different types of information…

Cost outlier means services provided during a single visit that have an extraordinarily high cost as established in paragraph “g” and are therefore eligible for additional payments above and beyond the base APC payment. The articles and research support materials available on this site are educational and are not intended to be investment or tax advice. All such information is provided solely for convenience purposes only and all users thereof should be guided accordingly. It depends on the size of the company you are running, but generally, they are vital because they would always tell you if your expenses are exceeding your income through reading your financial statements. Remain the same regardless of the number of units produced and sold. Inputs such as electricity and water supply , land use, insurance premium rates are some examples of other input prices.

Cost Driver | Cost Object | Cost Unit | Cost Center | Cost Account

The Activity Based Costing approach relates indirect cost to the activities that drive them to be incurred. Activity Based Costing is based on the belief that activities cause costs and therefore a link should be established between activities and product.

• Cost driver can be defined as a variable that causes a change in the costs as the cost driver changes.
• If a person operates a machine for 10 hours at a cost of $10 per hour, then the total cost that will be charged to the output of that particular time is $100.
• The system automatically creates routing information drivers when you run the Routing Information engine.
• If cost is to be managed effectively, attention has to be paid to key cost drivers.
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• In this case, for each hour of direct labor required for production, the company would then allocate $50 of indirect overhead costs to the production activities or output.

Cost drivers are not restricted to departments or sections, as more than one activity may be identified within a department. The hard number placed on each activity is always subject to change. In most cases, the cost drivers rise accordingly, as more units are produced and the business will simply factor these costs into their overhead structure. Cost drivers are the elements of a business that cause an overhead cost against the goods manufactured or services provided. Some cost drivers are necessary and unchangeable while others place a high than needed overhead cost against production. These unnecessary cost drivers ultimately drive down the margins and revenue produced. Where such local alternative Cost Drivers (“Local Cost Drivers”) are used, they are described in the Local Term Sheet.

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Find a definition, an explanation, and an analysis of cost drivers, and see helpful cost driver examples. Overhead costs are hypothesized to depend upon complexity as well as other factors. Complexity is represented by number of services and specialties provided by the hospital and average direct cost per ancillary specialty . Consequently, these two variables, breadth and depth, proxy for service complexity.

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• Cost drivers are important because they allow management to better understand the true costs by improving overhead allocation to their products.
• A positive relationship between capacity and complexity, hospitals with a larger number of beds tend to have greater breadth and depth.
• Cost driver analysis means analyzing the various possible cost drivers for a particular type of cost or activity etc. and explaining their cause and effect relationship between the activity and cost driver.

Download the free Know Your Economics guide to easily manage the factors incurring costs in your company. For this kind of cost driver, it can be raw materials and other items sold in bulk such as food ingredients used in fast-food restaurants, and the price of gas for a gas station. It makes that allocation possible, and only then the real cost of the product being manufactured will be determined. Then the management would decide whether to enter the market or not and whether to produce the product. The amount hospitals spend on Medicare malpractice insurance per patient day is positively related to average cost per specialty. If hospital reimbursements are based on costs, the cost per patient needs to be considered as well as the cost of an additional day spent in the hospital.

Activity cost drivers give a more accurate determination of the true cost of business activity by considering the indirect expenses. It is hard to determine the exact basis for the cost drivers to get the actual costs, which will defeat the ultimate goal of the business to find the actual cost of the product.

Cost drives application requires a thorough understanding of the cost functions. Otherwise, it would either be a selection of the wrong basis of allocation or an incorrect selection of process. It improves the relationship between the departments, as there are many common activities and processes which are performed for in various department. It provides a competitive edge to the business as they give a precise distribution of cost based on activities performed. A cost driver is the most appropriate way of calculating or determining a specific cost. The greater the number of discharges, the greater the breadth of services provided. Balancing transactions deal with the coordination of health care activities within the hospital.