Chapter 03 – Appendix A The Predetermined Overhead Rate and Capacity
3A-13
18. If the company bases its predetermined overhead rate on capacity, by how much was
manufacturing overhead underapplied or overapplied?
The management of Bow Corporation would like to investigate the possibility of basing its
predetermined overhead rate on activity at capacity. The company’s controller has provided an
example to illustrate how this new system would work. In this example, the allocation base is
machine-hours and the estimated amount of the allocation base for the upcoming year is
54,000 machine-hours. In addition, capacity is 68,000 machine-hours and the actual level of
activity for the year is 53,100 machine-hours. All of the manufacturing overhead is fixed and
is $2,129,760 per year. For simplicity, it is assumed that this is the estimated manufacturing
overhead for the year as well as the manufacturing overhead at capacity. It is further assumed
that this is also the actual amount of manufacturing overhead for the year. A number of jobs
were worked on during the year, one of which was Job E82X. This job required 100 machine-
hours.