Costing and Pricing

Lesson One – What to consider when pricing a product, factors which affect the profitability of a business. Common price-setting strategies, factors which influence the customer’s decision to buy. Ways to check that the price is right, how increasing or decreasing selling price affects profit, ways to market and sell products, defining direct costs and indirect costs, recovering costs.

Lesson Two – Examples of a service business, identifying overheads of a typical service business, calculating a suitable hourly rate, defining fixed costs, variable costs and semi-variable costs, understanding the break-even point on a graph, formula to calculate the break-even point, limitations of break-even analysis.

Lesson Three – What ‘contribution’ is and how it is calculated, how fixed costs, variable costs, selling price and profit interact, using Excel to carry out appropriate calculations, how contribution theory can help to make business decisions, setting out and interpreting a marginal cost statement, understanding what is meant by ‘absorption costing’.