Ewolucja koncepcji Activity-Based Costing

Over the past few years Activity-Based Costing has come to be one of the most popular approaches to management accounting in the United States, Great Britain and many other western countries. According to the ABC conception, indirect costs are allocated to products relative to activities and processes incurring these costs, instead of the classification by manufacturing sub-units, eg. departments, using different bases of costs repatriation, mostly not proportional to the production volume. I he area where the new idea of cost allocation was applied first was the calculation of product costs. I rom the time when the ABC conception was formulated till now it has evolved and developed to find various applications outside the product cost calculation. It is also employed in numerous applications in the widely understood service sector, involving diverse forms of activity, eg. airlines, telecommunications, computer services, power production, as well as in the health care and education for establishing relative ‘profitability’ in different educational areas. The ABC idea may be used, apart from the unit cost calculation, measuring the profit margin on sales of products or services by distribution areas or customers, in Activity-Based Budgeting and Activity-Based Management. This paper presents the nature and structure of Activity-Based Costing, i.e. calculation ol costs ol activities, and outlines the development of the different methods of management accounting derived from the ABC conception.