Activity-Based Costing

Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is an advanced costing method developed by Robert Kaplan and Robin Cooper that allocates overhead and indirect costs to products or services based on their actual consumption of activities. Rather than using arbitrary allocation bases (e.g., machine hours or direct labor), ABC traces costs to specific activities (purchasing, machine setup, quality control) and then to products based on which products actually consume those activities, providing more accurate product costs for decision making.