But the customized product probably takes much more design and engineering time than the mass-produced product. Traditional costing systems would not, in most cases, pick up this difference.

With traditional costing a company that makes both low and high volume products might spread all of its overhead to products it manufactures based solely on machine hours. This might misallocate overheads between products. And if one product demands a significant amount of engineering, testing and setup, but the other does not, the result will be some level of miscalculation of overheads. ABC/TDABC overcomes this problem by assigning overhead on more than the one activity of machine hours. Activity-based costing recognizes that the special engineering, special testing, machine setups, and others are activities that cause costs -- they cause the company to consume resources (Accountingcoach.com, n.d., para. 2-3).

ABC became popular in the early 1980s because there was dissatisfaction with traditional accounting...
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