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Various adjustments to historical cost are used, many of which require the use of management judgment and may be difficult to verify. The trend in most accounting standards is towards more timely reflection of the fair or market value of some assets and liabilities, although the historical cost principle remains in use.
Historical cost principle: requires companies to account and report assets' and liabilities' acquisition costs rather than fair market value. This principle provides information that is reliable (removing opportunity to provide subjective and potentially biased market values), but not very relevant. Thus there is a trend to use fair values.
In accounting, the cost principle is part of the generally accepted accounting principles. Assets should always be recorded at their cost, when the asset is new and also for the life of the asset. Assets should always be recorded at their cost, when the asset is new and also for the life of the asset.
Depreciation allocates the cost of an asset over its expected lifespan according to the matching principle. For example, if a machine is purchased for $100,000, has a lifespan of 10 years, and produces the same amount of goods each year, then $10,000 of the cost (i.e., $100,000 divided by 10 years) is allocated to each year.
An important part of standard cost accounting is a variance analysis, which breaks down the variation between actual cost and standard costs into various components (volume variation, material cost variation, labor cost variation, etc.) so managers can understand why costs were different from what was planned and take appropriate action to ...
a) Historical cost principle (Kieso, Weygandt and Warfield)p38 – the only time this principle reflects cost is at the initial time of purchase or acquisition. In subsequent periods, the historical cost along with taxation-driven depreciation methods does not help managers determine their current operational cost factors.
The stable measuring unit assumption (traditional Historical Cost Accounting) during annual inflation of 26% for 3 years in a row would erode 100% of the real value of all constant real value non-monetary items not maintained under the Historical Cost paradigm. B. Under Constant Purchasing Power Accounting the underlying assumptions in IFRS are:
The restatement of historical cost financial statements in terms of IAS 29 does not signify the abolishment of the historical cost model. This is confirmed by PricewaterhouseCoopers: "Inflation-adjusted financial statements are an extension to, not a departure from, historical cost accounting."