The use of job costing as a tool for the pricing and cost control decisions in the printing industry: the case of Société de Presse et d'Editions (SOPECAM)

III. RECOMMENDATIONS

The recommendations to be made from the results of this study are centred around one main point: the Managerial accounting department.

v The sketch-determination of the unit cost of Cameroon-tribune that has been achieved by this study, is normally part of the work to be achieved in a managerial accounting department, the determination of the allocation bases for the overhead costs of the company are also the concern of such a department; we therefore recommend the management of SOPECAM to establish and make operational a managerial accounting department in order for them to have accurate indicators of their profitability.

v This managerial accounting department will be encouraged to use the job costing method when trying to cost the printing works of SOPECAM, as it is an important tool for pricing and cost control (Maher & Deakin, 1994^26(*)). This is because customers always ask fro estimates in advance and they award jobs on a competitive basis, consequently, SOPECAM must be able to estimate costs accurately if they are to compete and make a profit.

v Concerning the selling price of Cameroon Tribune, unless it is part of the governmental policy, we wish to propose an increase in its selling price. This will enable the company to prepare itself to the possible shortage of funds from the government.

v As one could have mentioned, we have just made estimates of the editorial labour costs, selling and distribution expenses of the newspaper. The company must therefore endeavour to keep accurate data about all these expenses, for they are all part of the unit cost of the product.

v Another recommendation to be added is at the level of the cost structure of the company; since the labour costs are not that much important as the management of the company tend to believe, we recommend the company to look for another allocation basis for its overhead costs. Because of the relative importance of the material costs, it may be possible to investigate their composition in order to have a deeper insight into the cost structure of the company and therefore the into the real causes of the incurrence of costs by the company.

IV. LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY

The scope of this study has been continuously narrowed down because of many factors, namely:

The limited access to the confidential data of the company

The time constraint; such a study normally requires enough time to analyse in detail all the processes involved in the production and distribution of the product, but here we have been obliged to limit our research because of the shortage of the time resource.

By far the most limiting factor to the effective conduct of the research work, the financial resources did not enable us to make a thorough collection and analysis of data as we wished.

Finally, the scarcity of empirical studies on job costing did not help us in the process of making this research work an improvement of former studies.

V. PROPOSITIONS FOR FURTHER STUDIES

For this research work to be complete, other studies need to be conducted on the following topics or areas:

Ø An analysis of SOPECAM's cost structure.

Ø The Marketing and distribution of the products of Nationalised companies.

Ø Costing methods for routine Works: Job or Process costing?

* ²⁶ Maher, M.W. & Deakin, E.B. (1994), Cost Accounting (4^th edition), Irwin, Homewood, Illinois