Material and labour costs are easy to trace to products. when looking Literature review

Material and labour costs are easy to trace to products. when looking at overhead cost it becomes more difficult. Undertake a l - Literature review Example Eksteen and Rosenberg (2002) have included other costs like communication, human resources, travelling, auditing, asset ownership etc. in the overhead costs. There is an important relationship existing between the direct and the indirect costs. Warsame (2006) stated that the direct and the indirect costs include the majority portion of the entire construction process. Some companies determine overhead costs as a percentage of the total direct costs. Carr (1988) stated that direct costs such as material, labour etc. are directly chargeable to the performed or implemented activity. Hegazi and Molsehi (1995) have estimated the overhead costs as a percentage of the total direct costs in 14 percent of their survey. Several researches have been made on the overhead costs and it has been divided into two parts. One is the work site overhead including the staff salary, the electricity charges, water supply charges, renting equipment and other is the administration cost (for example- office s taff costs, insurance taxes, other fees etc.) (Shelton and Brugh, 2002; Carr, 1989; Assaf et al., 1999, 2001). Both these groups of overhead costs are required to be recovered by a company. There are two types of costing systems for determining the cost of a product. One is the traditional costing system and the other is the activity based costing system. Traditional costing system uses financial accounting information and activity based costing system uses management accounting information. While calculating the overhead cost