On Saturday, November 20, 2021, an online guest lecture was held on the topic "Recent Trends in Activity-Based Costing." The guest lecture featured Dr. Sandeep Kumar Kesarwani from Gopal Narayan Singh University, Bihar, India. Approximately 150 undergraduate students taking Cost Accounting and Management Accounting classes attended the lecture.

Dr. Sandeep opened his presentation by discussing the definition of Activity Based Costing (ABC). ABC is a costing system that focuses on the activities performed to produce a product; in other words, costs are traced first to activities and then to products. ABC is commonly used as a tool to understand product and customer costs and profitability. As global competition intensifies, companies are producing an increasing variety of products and services. They are finding that producing different products and services places varying demands on their resources. The need to more accurately measure these increasingly diverse products and services has led companies such as American Express, Boeing, General Motors, and Exxon Mobil to refine their costing systems. One of the primary ways companies worldwide are refining their costing systems is through activity-based costing, or ABC.

After explaining the definition of ABC, Dr. Sandeep then explained the evolution of the ABC concept, which originally came from the traditional system, often referred to as Traditional Based Costing. He then went on to explain the differences between traditional costing and ABC. When focused on costs incurred, traditional costing fails to capture cause and effect relationships. Traditional accounting is limited to providing information only at the product level. Meanwhile, current manufacturing technology demands feedback from performance while production is still in progress. Therefore, the ABC system is used to overcome these shortcomings. In addition to presenting the material, Dr. Sandeep also provided a case study on ABC calculations.