What Is Cost Control? Cost control is the practice of identifying and reducing business expenses to increase profits, and it starts with the budgeting process. A business owner compares the company’s actual financial results with the budgeted expectations, and if actual costs are higher than planned, management has the information it needs to take action.
What Is Cost Cutting? Cost cutting refers to measures implemented by a company to reduce its expenses and improve profitability. Cost cutting measures are typically implemented during times of financial distress for a company or during economic downturns. They can also be enacted if a company’s management expects profitability issues in the future, where cost
What Is Cost Depletion? Cost depletion is one of two accounting methods used to allocate the costs of extracting natural resources, such as timber, minerals, and oil, and to record those costs as operating expenses to reduce pretax income. It’s a method for allocating extraction costs, charged as an expense. The yearly depletion cost is
What Is the Cost of Acquisition? The cost of acquisition is the total expense incurred by a business in acquiring a new client or purchasing an asset. An accountant will list a company’s cost of acquisition as the total after any discounts are added and any closing or transaction costs are deducted. Cost of acquisition
What Is Cost of Carry? Cost of carry refers to costs associated with the carrying value of an investment. These costs can include financial costs, such as the interest costs on bonds, interest expenses on margin accounts, interest on loans used to make an investment, and any storage costs involved in holding a physical asset. Cost of carry may also include opportunity costs associated
What Is the Cost of Equity? The cost of equity is the return that a company requires to decide if an investment meets capital return requirements. Firms often use it as a capital budgeting threshold for the required rate of return. A firm’s cost of equity represents the compensation that the market demands in exchange
What Is the Cost of Funds? The term cost of funds refers to how much banks and financial institutions spend in order to acquire money to lend to their customers. Put simply, the cost of funds refers to the interest rate banks must pay when they borrow from a Federal Reserve bank. The spread between
What Is the Cost of Labor? The cost of labor is the sum of all wages paid to employees, as well as the cost of employee benefits and payroll taxes paid by an employer. The cost of labor is broken into direct and indirect (overhead) costs. Direct costs include wages for the employees that produce
What Is the Cost of Living? The cost of living is the amount of money needed to cover basic expenses such as housing, food, taxes, and healthcare in a certain place and time period. The cost of living is often used to compare how expensive it is to live in one city versus another. The
What Is Cost of Revenue? The term cost of revenue refers to the total cost of manufacturing and delivering a product or service to consumers. Cost of revenue information is found in a company’s income statement. It is designed to represent the direct costs associated with the goods and services the company provides. The service
