Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing

CHAPTER TWO

ESTIMATING PROCESS TIMES

The Role of Time Equations

TIME-DRIVEN ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING, as the name implies, uses time to drive resource costs directly to objects such as transactions, orders, products, services, and customers. The use of a resource capacity metric, time, as the primary cost driver enables TDABC to skip the complex stage, in conventional ABC, of allocating resource costs to activities before driving them to cost objects. TDABC uses time as its primary cost driver since most resources, such as personnel and equipment, have capacities that can be readily measured by the amount of time they are available to perform work. Some resources, however, as shown below, measure capacity with other units:

Resource	Capacity ...