traditional costing definition

The allocation of manufacturing overhead (indirect manufacturing costs) to products on the basis of a volume metric such as direct labor hours or production machine hours. As manufacturing becomes more sophisticated the manufacturing overhead costs usually increase while the direct labor hours or production machine hours decrease. Hence, the direct labor or machine hours are unlikely to be the root cause of the manufacturing overhead.

Activity based costing (ABC) has developed as a technique to overcome the shortcomings of traditional costing.