Abstract:

Although it has extensively been studied and recommended in academic area, Activity-Based Costing (ABC), which has been developed since 1980s because traditional volume-based costing methods failed to calculate accurate product cost, is not attracted anticipated attention in practice. New generation costing methods started to be recommended instead of ABC that is criticized because it is a complicated and a hard to be formed, maintained, and modified system. Resource Consumption Accounting (RCA) is one of those methods. RCA is a new management accounting system that is a mixture of ABC and German cost accounting system (GPK). There is a hypothesis that resources create costs in RCA while the origin of costs is activities in ABC. Because of this, focus is on recourses in RCA. On the other hand, RCA classifies resource costs as fixed and proportional according to cost behavior and enables to calculate idle capacity costs. Calculated idle capacity costs are not allocated to the products, so products do not receive a share from resources they did not consume. As a result of this, detailed and accurate cost information can be provided to the managers in their decision making processes. The aim of this study is to explain RCA with its evolution, components, and cost allocation process as a new management accounting method, which can be used to obtain highly important cost information for management decisions. In this study, first of all RCA’s evolution and its components are explained. Then out of a hypothetic example, allocation of resource costs to the products as a cost object are made using both ABC and RCA methods. Thus, new method’s aim, components, advantages, and disadvantages are investigated by displaying the differences between two methods.

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