Chapter 4: Process Costing
Managers need to assign costs to products to facilitate external financial reporting and internal decision making. This chapter illustrates an absorption costing approach to calculating product costs known as process costing.
Job-order and process costing are similar in that they both deal with assigning materials, labor, and overhead to products as a way to calculate the unit product cost.
Both systems use Raw Materials Inventory, Work in Process Inventory, and Finished Goods Inventory.
The flow of costs is similar, but not exactly the same, in the two systems.
Both systems assign material, labor, and overhead costs to products and they provide a mechanism for computing unit product costs.
Both systems use the same manufacturing accounts, including Manufacturing Overhead, Raw Materials, Work in Process, and Finished Goods.
The flow of costs through the manufacturing accounts is basically the same in both systems.