III. Two Stage Cost System Analysis
The two stage method is always used in Activity-Based Costing, which assigns resource costs to cost objects base on separate activities. In stage one, the total overhead costs are allocated to the separate activities base on different resource drivers. In stage two, the costs of activities are allocated to each cost object base on cost drivers.
In this case, because the wages and depreciation costs can be traced directly to each workstation, we only need to allocate the rent and other indirect costs to the five workstations. In stage two, we have to assign the overhead cost of each workstation to each job base on the labor hours that each job consumed.

Table 1: Stage One: The total overhead allocation to different workstations Job Preparation Scanning Assembly Output Quality
Control Idle Total
Wages $ 8,000 $ 32,000 $ 64,000 $ 10,000 $ 11,000 $ 125,000
Depreciate 500 25,000 $ 10,000 14,000 500 50,000
Rent 2,000 2,000 8,000 4,000 1,000 13,000 30,000

Others 1,311.5 5,246 10,492 1,639 1,311.5 20,000
Total Overhead 11,811.5 64,246 92,492 29,639 13,811.5 13,000 225,000
Allocation rate $ 73.82 $ 100.38 $ 72.26 $ 148.20 $ 86.32
In table 1, we allocate the total overhead costs to different workstations. Because the labor hours of each workstation are available in this case, we can use the labor hours as the cost drive to assign the overhead of each workstation to each job. The overhead cost per labor hour is the rate that we use to allocate the indirect cost.
Table 2: Stage two: Overhead costs assignment to Job 61001
Job 61001 Job Preparation Scanning Assembly Output Quality Control Total
Labor hours 4 32 42 8 7 93
Overhead costs $ 295 $ 3,212 $ 3,035 $ 1,186 $ 604 $ 8,332
In the table 2, we use the labor hours consumed in Job 61001 to compute the overhead cost that assigned to this cost object. The