What is Notional cost?
Notional means imaginary, speculative or conceptual i.e. something that has no actual existence and is mere imagination. Same way a notional cost is an imaginary cost which is sometimes included in the cost units and cost centers to make costing estimates more realistic or simply more challenging especially when the performance of cost unit and […]
What is the difference between Cost and Expense?
Most of the time the difference between the terms Cost and Expense is ignored and are used interchangeably. However, the difference is significant from accounting perspective and being an accountant it is good if we keep these two terms separate to cause lesser confusion and clearer communication of financial information. Cost can be defined as […]
What is meant by Apportionment of overheads?
Most of the time overheads are not caused by a single product or a cost center and are jointly incurred on one or more product or by one or more departments. Therefore, we cannot charge such overheads specifically to each department or simply they cannot be allocated. Even though we cannot charge some kinds overheads […]
What is meant by direct overheads? Does allocated overheads mean direct overheads?
First of all we need to understand the definitions of overheads, direct expenses, allocation and apportionment itself in order to explain the answer of this question. Overheads mean such costs and expenses that were incurred during the production process but it is impossible to identify or trace such costs back to a particular product or […]
What is conversion cost?
Conversion cost is the sum of all such costs that are incurred in converting one article into intended output. Mostly, coversion costs represents the costs of all such activities or resources that have been applied in converting raw materials to finished items. In mathematical or equation form conversion costs are forumalated as follows: Conversion cost […]
What is prime cost?
Prime cost is a sum of all the direct costs i.e. prime cost is the aggregate of all such costs that can be traced back to products (cost units) or cost centers. Thus prime cost means sum of direct material costs, direct labour costs and direct expenses. Direct material costs include cost incurred on material […]

