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Production Report Used in Cost Accounting

The production report is used extensively in manufacturing operations. Production is where the money is made for the business. Almost all other employees of a manufacturing business that are not directly involved in the production of goods will support the production operations in some way. Since production operations is where the money is made, it is necessary to review and analyze it, one way to do this by reviewing the production report.

The format of the report will vary from business to business based on the manufacturing resource package (MRP) that is being used, the requirements of management, and the amount of detail analysis that is desired. It is possible for every employee that is involved in production and the support of production to record their time in detail, recording the time spent working on a particular part, the amount of downtime, the setup time, etc. All this is very useful information, but most plants will not collect this much detail because it is difficult and expensive to do so.

Usually, a standard is developed by engineering that determines how many pieces can be manufactured in a certain amount of time. The engineers will take into account employee break times, machine downtime, machine cycle times, etc. This standard then is entered into the MRP system and is used to calculate standard costs and produce reports for management.

Below is a very small example of how the production report might look. The information will be by part number, and will show the pieces produced, the time spent on production, standard hours earned, etc. Most measurements are compared to the standard that was developed. This information can be used to analyze how operations are doing. If the actual amount of pieces produced are much less than the standard, then management will look into why this happened. A plan may be developed to correct problems or to engineer improvements in the work area.


Part # 1 Part# 2 Part# 3
Operation 10 20 10
Pcs Produced 1000 800 350
Production Hours 6 3 12
Downtime Hours 2 .50 4
Pcs per Hour 167 267 29
Std Pcs per Hour 300 300 200
Actual vs Std per hr -133 -33 -171

Often, ideas to automate a work area, rearrange a work cell, speed up machinery, and other ways to improve the production rate and costs will start with this report. Sometimes, a company will quote new work knowing that it will lose money on it if production remains the way it is, but they are confident that enough improvements can be made to the process to create a profit. In these cases, this report is very valuable, and will be compared to previous reports to see progress over time.