Excerpt from How to Find Factory Costs The Federal Trade Commission has called attention to the fact that less than 20 per cent of the business concerns in this country have a cost system, and that a large proportion of the many failures recorded every year are due to the absence of an accurate knowledge of what it costs to manufacture and sell. The Commission is urging every business man to take this first step in the development of that primary effectiveness by means of which this country can alone be brought to an appropriate degree of industrial preparedness. Realizing that the very large majority of our industrial concerns consists of small plants unable to afford the kind of expert assistance which the larger concerns have drawn on for the development of their cost systems, the publishers of factory and system have from time to time presented articles showing how simple cost systems have been and may be developed. These articles have usually shown applications to special lines of business, and, on account of this fact and the limitations of space, they have not individually been able to handle the subject in comprehensive detail. In preparing How to Find Factory Costs the services of a competent expert have therefore been enlisted to outline briefly and clearly the elements of a good cost system, in such a way that it can be understood and applied by the average manager and the average accountant of the average small plant, without in the least sacrificing that degree of thoroughness and accuracy vital to the success of any cost system. The book is planned to be broad enough to apply to all kinds ofindustries. It is intended to be detailed enough to be useful to the accountant, and at the same time to include the rela tion of cost statistics to the entire effectiveness of operation, so as to be most useful to the factory head. The author, C. Bertrand Thompson, was selected on account of his experience in the development of cost and efficiency systems in a wide variety of industries, including machine shops, electrical specialties, shoe factories, book binderies, printing plants, and box factories. In addition to this experience, his record as a teacher of factory management at Harvard University, and as a writer on this and other subjects for factory, system, and other magazines, proves him capable of conveying his practical knowledge to others in a form both instructive and interesting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.