Shop Costs

(general shop outlays), the administrative and operating costs of a shop. Shop costs include the cost of maintaining the shop’s administrative and operational staff (basic and supplementary wages with deductions for social security), total amortization costs, and the cost of maintenance and current repair of the buildings, installations, and equipment that make up the shop’s fixed assets; the cost of testing, experimentation, and research, as well as of efficiency measures and inventions; expenditures on labor safety measures; the cost of wear, or deterioration, of inferior or rapidly deteriorating equipment and the amounts expended on its repair and restoration within the operational process; and miscellaneous costs, as well as certain nonproduction expenses.

Shop costs are part of the prime cost of the production (work and services) of a given shop; such costs are included in the prime cost of the respective manufactured items by means of a conventional system of apportionment. The order of apportionment of shop costs—both over costed items and between the unfinished and the finished product—is established by the rules of the appropriate branch of industry pertaining to the planning, accounting, and calculation of the prime cost of industrial production. Machine-building shop costs, as a rule, are apportioned among the individual types of products in proportion to the wages of production workers (not including bonus payments) plus the cost of equipment maintenance and operation; in the chemical industry, shop costs are apportioned in proportion to the total amount expended on processing, excluding the cost of raw materials and of semifinished goods produced by the shops themselves; and in textile production, in proportion to the number of loom-hours worked.

Certain itemized shop costs, which can be influenced by the shop unit, are included as part of the shops’ profit-and-loss accounting indicators for the purpose of monitoring the observance of shop cost estimates, identifying the possible means of reducing costs, and eliminating nonproduction expenses.