What is it?
Practice
CIMA Official Terminology describes activity-based costing as an approach to the costing and monitoring of activities, which involves tracing resource consumption and costing final outputs. Resources are assigned to activities and activities to cost objects. The latter use cost drivers to attach activity costs to outputs.
ABC was first defined in the late 1980s by Kaplan and Bruns. It can be considered as the modern alternative to absorption costing, allowing managers to better understand product