Product costing in UK manufacturing organizations

Colin Drury and Mike Tayles

European Accounting Review, 1994, vol. 3, issue 3, 443-470

Abstract: This paper reports and comments on the findings from a questionnaire survey on the product costing practices used by 260 UK manufacturing companies. The aims of the paper are (1) to provide evidence to ascertain the extent to which recent criticisms of product costing can be judged and (2) to compare and comment upon the theory and practice of product costing. The survey findings indicate that product costs computed to meet inventory valuation requirements are widely used for decision-making and internal profit measurement. The majority of firms, however, used both full costs and variable costs for decision-making and the findings suggest that product cost information is used in a more flexible manner than that depicted by previous studies. The paper reports on the methods used by companies to compute full product costs. Most organizations used questionable overhead allocations that are likely to result in the reporting of distorted product costs. The concluding sections of the paper discuss the possible reasons why observed practices differ from conventional wisdom and suggest areas where further research is required.

Date: 1994
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (28)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09638189400000031 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:euract:v:3:y:1994:i:3:p:443-470

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REAR20

DOI: 10.1080/09638189400000031

Access Statistics for this article

European Accounting Review is currently edited by Laurence van Lent

More articles in European Accounting Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().