Costing Spreadsheet - Good Book

[StewartS]

I'm about to attempt to look at building a spreadsheet to cost our services. Can anybody suggest a good book that may help with this. I'm not looking at a "how to do it in excel specific book" but more the type of book that can provide guidence on the structure and how to go about it.

Thanks in advance

Stewart

 

[gwkenny]

The closest thing you're going to find is a Cost Accounting text book. Or a production (operations/production) textbook. It's been too long since I was in college so I can't recommend a textbook. I just do this stuff

Lot of it depends on what your core business is, that'll tell you what costing approach you should use.

If you are a manufacturer you're going to be much more material oriented. For example you'll have to decide how you're going to cost your inventory. LIFO, FIFO, Average blah blah blah. How to allocate processing costs. Maintenance. Calculating effects of material rejects, etc...

If you're more a service industry then you're going to be more focused on man hours and SG&A components.

To do a full costing analysis, you'll have to estimate material substitution, re-tooling analysis, etc.... Cyclicality, overtime, blah blah blah.