High-Low Method in Accounting

It has the disadvantage, however, of using two extreme data points, which may not be representative of normal conditions. The method may yield unreliable estimates of a and b in the formula. In such a case, it would be wise to drop these data points and choose two other points that are more representative … The company hasfound that if a delivery truck is driven for 52,500 miles in a month, its average operating cost comes to45.6 cents per mile. If the same truck is driven for only 35,000 miles in a month, its averageoperating cost increases to 53.6 cents per mile.

In order to use the high-low method, you will have to combine the fixed and variable costs of production within your company to come up with a total cost. You will notice that the high-low method will only give you an estimate of what total costs would be at any given amount of production. These estimates are helpful to management when preparing budgets for upcoming months. The given formula provides the variable cost per unit of production. Sometimes, the fixed cost in semi-variable cost is a stepped fixed cost.

Calculate Variable Cost Per Unit, Fixed Cost, Volume

The second step of the process is where we take the cost per unit that we established from the first step and figure out the fixed costs for that level of production. Once we have those two pieces of information, we can use them to figure out the approximate cost for any level of production. The high-low method separates mixed costs to fixed costs and variable costs.

April is the high point with 2,950 oil changes and January is the low point with 2,200 oil changes. The high-low point method uses only two data points (i.e., the highest and the lowest activity levels) which are generally not enough to get the satisfactory results. Moreover, these highest and lowest points often do not represent the usual activity levels of a business. The high-low point formula, therefore, may misrepresent the entity’s true cost behavior during the periods of normal activity levels. Consider the total production cost of February was USD 45,000 and the number of units produced was 10,000.

What Are the Disadvantages of the High-Low Accounting Method?

The high low method is very useful for helping management determine not only what total costs will be, but also how much of a certain product to produce. For instance, it does not recognize any other costs except the highest and lowest costs. As a result, you should not rely only on this information to determine the true variable and fixed costs.

The high-low method computes the variable cost rate by dividing the change in the total costs by the change in the number of units of manufactured. In other words, the $4,800 change in total costs is divided by the change in units of 300 to yield the variable cost rate of $16 per unit of product. Since the fixed costs are the total costs minus the variable costs, the fixed costs will be calculated to a negative $400. This video demonstrates how the high-low method can be applied to Danny Office Supplies to estimate shipping costs next month. Account analysis is a cost analysis method that requires a review of accounts by experienced employees to determine whether the costs in each account are fixed or variable.

High-Low Method Calculator

A straight line on the graph connects the highest price and lowest price of goods. To illustrate the average, a line is created linking the lowest and highest values. The lowest number of units manufactured is then subtracted from the greatest number of units manufactured. Let’s say you are a hotel manager and are concerned about the cost of which the hotel is incurring, and you want to derive a model to predict future cost based on historical cost. You have collected data for the last 10 months and want to see the cost for the next 2 months.

Thankfully, there are many tools available that can help you in identifying and managing variable, fixed, and mixed costs. The variable cost per unit can be found using a simple slope formula. According to the formula below, the variable cost per unit is 75 cents. Using either the high or low activity cost should yield approximately the same fixed cost value.

Steps involved in high-low point method

Because of all those limitations, this method is ineffective in producing accurate and precise results. For example, the table below depicts the activity for a cake bakery for each of the 12 months of a given year.

• In any business, three types of costs exist Fixed Cost, Variable Cost, and Mixed Cost (a combination of fixed and variable costs).
• This method is not the most precise method but it is the easiest to calculate.
• Consider the total production cost of February was USD 45,000 and the number of units produced was 10,000.

Hence, once the limit of normal production capacity is reached, the company has to incur another fixed cost irrespective of additional units to be produced. The high-low method is relatively unreliable because it only takes two extreme activity levels into consideration. In this case, the high-low method will produce inaccurate results. The high-low method does not consider small details such as variation in costs. It assumes that fixed and unit variable costs are constant, which is not always the case in real life. Once you have the variable cost per unit, you can calculate the fixed cost.

What happens when the high-low method ends up with a negative amount?

Another drawback of the high-low method is the ready availability of better cost estimation tools. For example, the least-squares regression is a method that takes into consideration all data points and creates an optimized cost estimate. Lastly, the extreme values (highest and lowest) used by the high-low method may happen to be outliers. This can be remedied by redoing the computation if there are any changes within the costs. The thing is, Allen became too involved with his other businesses that he wasn’t able to monitor the costs of his donut shop.

That means that for every additional oil change performed, the total cost increases by the variable rate. In January (the low point), the end of year bookkeeping company performed 2,200 oil changes with a total cost of $9,860. Those additional oil changes cost the company an additional $1,725.