Harvard Business Review Leadership & Strategy Boxed Set (5 Books)

8

Costs and Expenses

No Hard-and-Fast Rules

Most managers have plenty of personal experience with expenses. But did you know that there are plenty of estimates and potential biases on those expense lines? Let’s examine the major line items.

COST OF GOODS SOLD OR COST OF SERVICES

As you probably do know, expenses on the income statement fall into two basic categories. The first is cost of goods sold, or COGS. As usual, there are a couple of different names for this category—in a service company, for instance, it may be called cost of services (COS). We’ve also frequently seen cost of revenue and cost of sales. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll use the acronyms COGS or COS. At any rate, what matters isn’t the label, it’s what’s included. The idea behind ...