Flexible Budgeting in an Activity-Based Costing Framework.

This article focuses on flexible budgeting in an activity-based costing (ABC) framework. The researchers indicated that some resources, such as energy to operate machines or overtime labor, are supplied only as needed so that no unused capacity can exist for these resources. The costs of supplying such resources are what many people have characterized as "variable costs" since the spending on these resources varies directly with the demands or usage for the resources. The assumption that the costs of resources to perform an activity are either entirely "variable" or "fixed," or flexible or committed, as they will be referred to in the remainder of this paper, is not an inherent feature of activity-based cost systems. In such cases, the activity cost exhibits a mixed behavior, with the total cost of performing the activity representing a combination of committed and flexible supply of resources in response to demand fluctuations.