Activity-Based-Costing (ABC)

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - Accounting and Taxes, grade: 1,0, University of the West of England, Bristol (Bristol Business School), course: Advanced Management Accounting, language: English, abstract: Activity Based Costing, short ABC, was developed in the 1980s as it became apparent that the traditional management accounting practices could no longer meet the arising requirements due to a dramatically changing environment. Therefore, to detect this way towards ABC, this report will start to look at the book ‘Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting‘ of Johnson and Kaplan, where they introduce ABC as a recommendation to overcome the shortcomings of the traditional accounting method. In the subsequent passages of this paper, it is examined how the initial ABC proposed by Johnson and Kaplan has been criticised and expanded. Several impacts on organisations of ABC and its later developments into ABM and ABB are then reported. And finally, all findings will be summarised and it is discussed whether the original criticisms of traditional management accounting techniques really have been outperformed.