Manufacturing Accounts

Most businesses you have studied so far buy goods and sell them again unchanged. A manufacturer is different: it takes raw material, adds labour and other costs, and makes the goods it sells. That extra activity needs an extra statement, the manufacturing account, whose single job is to work out exactly what it cost to produce the finished goods during the year. Get that figure right and the rest of the financial statements fall neatly into place.

In this lesson you will learn to tell direct costs from indirect ones, build up the prime cost and then the cost of production, and adjust for goods left half-finished at the year end. You will see how the cost of production flows into the income statement to give gross profit, and how the leftover inventories appear in the statement of financial position. Master this and you can read a factory's accounts with confidence.