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After reading and working trough the examiner’s report covering July to December 2014, I had a question on how we treat fixed costs in budgets.
In the examiner’s report, Example 1, he asks to find the flexed budget profit after giving us all the necessary info including a cost card and a selling price. The cost card included a cost per unit for the Fixed production over head. The “trick” in the question was that Fixed costs do not change from one output of the fixed budget to the different output in the flexed. While, I got the question right, I was looking back at the variance analysis chapter in the Open Tuition notes, the first example asks us to write a flexed budget. There I notice that we change the fixed over head number from 130,500 to 133,500 from fixed to flexed budget respectively, which accounts for the increase in production. Is there something that I am missing, why do we treat fixed costs differently in both these scenarios?
Thank you,
RachelWhen prepared flexed budgets, fixed overheads stay fixed by definition.
If you listen to the lecture on variances again, you will see that I flex the fixed overheads purely to explain the problem that there is with fixed overhead variances if we are using absorption costing. With absorption costing, using a standard profit per unit is effectively flexing the fixed overheads and that is why we end up needing a fixed overhead volume variance (which we don’t need when using marginal costing).
This, however, is only a variance problem.
If we are simply flexing a budget then fixed overheads do stay fixed.
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