Jonas, a retiree, wants to use his savings to open a day care facility for dogs. After deciding on the services that he would provide to his customers, he calculates costs versus the demand and the profit he could make depending on the volume of sales. After extensive deliberation, Jonas decides to take a bank loan because the needed initial investment is too high for opening the facility. Jonas is currently in the stage of the new-product development process.

Activity-based costing (abc) is not truly a cost collection mechanism as much as it is an inventory valuation method. the main purpose for implementing an activity-based cost system is to try to overcome some of the cost distortions that occur in traditional costing from product differences when there are variations in size and complexity. however, one of the disadvantages of utilizing abc is that the additional information gathering necessary to implement costing with that level of detail might be beyond the reach of some companies with resource or financial constraints. with this in mind, what kinds of industries or companies do you think would benefit most from using activity-based costing and why? in designing or modifying an accounting system to capture appropriate costs for abc, what considerations do you think would need to be made?