Diane Barone was a good friend of yours in high school and is from your home town. While you chose to major in accounting when you both went away to college, she majored in marketing and management. You have recently been promoted to accounting manager for the Snack Foods Division of Melton Enterprises, and your friend was promoted to regional sales manager for the same division of Melton. Diane recently telephoned you. She explained that she was familiar with job cost sheets, which had been used by the Special Projects division where she had formerly worked. She was, however, very uncomfortable with the production cost reports prepared by your division. She emailed you a list of her particular questions:
1. Since Melton occasionally prepares snack foods for special orders in the Snack Foods Division, why don’t we track costs of the orders separately?
2. What is an equivalent unit?
3. Why am I getting four production cost reports? Isn’t there one Work in Process account?
Instructions
Prepare a memo to Diane. Answer her questions, and include any additional information you think would be helpful. You may write informally, but do use proper grammar and punctuation.
SOLUTION
To: Diane Barone, Regional Sales Manager
From: Student, Accounting Manager
Re: Production Cost Reports
Diane, congratulations again on your promotion! It’s going to be great working with you. It kind of reminds me of our days at Dairy-Freeze after school (although this work is more fun, and it certainly pays better!).
I’ll try to clear up some of the questions you raised in your email. Here in the Snack Foods Division we use process costing rather than the job order system that Special Projects uses. The reason for this is that we produce all our products in a more or less continuous process, even when we run occasional special orders. You see, all our workers are assigned a particular part of the process to control. One might be in charge of making sure the mixing machines work properly, while another verifies the weight of the finished products. Whichever job a worker is assigned, he or she stays with it to completion, or at least the completion of that particular process. That’s different from what you had in Special Projects, where workers moved from job to job. That’s why we don’t usually track the orders separately. Our special orders are for various quantities of the foods we produce, so only the Packing Department needs to be concerned with the particular set of products shipped to the particular customer—which is its ordinary concern anyway.
Your next question was about what an equivalent unit is. Well, you know already that Special Projects bids on various jobs, and then costs are recorded when the jobs are complete. The costs accumulated on jobs that aren’t complete are reflected in Work in Process inventory. We in Snack Foods can’t use that method for a simple reason—we produce our products in huge batches that we keep going fairly continuously. Or, in other words, we don’t have a “job” that we can record as “complete.” A batch may contain enough of our product to fill thirty or more orders, so we may have thirty or more “jobs” in each batch. One job may happen to be filled from two batches. Since the cost of each batch is about the same, it isn’t worth keeping track of separately.
At the end of the month, we need to record what we finished and what still remains undone. Equivalent units are the way we measure the amount of work we have done on our work in process. It’s kind of like comparing the contents of 4-ounce cups with the contents of 12-ounce cups. It doesn’t make sense to compare by counting the number of cups you have. You need to find out how many ounces you have in one set; then you can get a meaningful comparison with the ounces you have in the other set. We compare by the number of “units” of materials or labor that are required to finish a product completely. If it requires 12 ounces of flour and 15 minutes of labor for a finished bag of pretzels, for example, then the 12 ounces and 15 minutes are “finished equivalents.” If we have enough pretzels to fill 30 bags, but we’ve only spent 5 minutes (or 1/3 of the total required) of labor on them at the end of the month, we could have used the same amount
of time and completely finished 10 bags. Thus, we have the “equivalent” of
10 bags worth of labor.
Your last question is the easiest to answer. You get four reports because we use four processes here in Snack Foods Division. Each process has to report its status at the end of every month. It’s kind of like we have four miniature factories, each reporting “completion” of a certain number of products. The products from one department are used as raw materials for other departments, so we have a chain of reports. Notice that the units and costs transferred out of Process 1 are the same as the units and costs transferred in to Process 2, and so on.
I hope this helps. Call, write, or email me any time!