As part of our Year 13 Accounting programme, we have been looking at job costing. This involves looking at direct and indirect costs in the form of materials, employee labour, and overheads such as electricity.

To demonstrate to the students the difference between direct and indirect costs, as well as how to calculate overheads, they were set the task of building a house.

The students had two periods to design and build a house using craft supplies, tape and a glue gun. Each item had a cost, either per individual sheet, such as the corrugated card used for the roof, or per centimetre e.g., the tape. They had to keep track of each item used as well as each minute using the hot glue gun. They also had to keep track of time on the job to calculate the total labour.

In the end, they had built a fully costed house for $10,020. We will continue to use this house as we progress through the job costing standard and the students will be able to use their building experience to differentiate between costs for the various examples we work with.

It was a fun activity to make job costing real.