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Gantt, Henry Laurence (1861-1919)
The American industrial engineer Henry Laurence Gantt made notable contributions to accounting analysis during its formative period. A colleague and disciple of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Gantt saw budgeting as a means of as-signing responsibility and measuring perfor-mance, not just as a way of limiting expendi-tures. He pioneered the use of visual aids in planning and controlling operations. The Gantt Chart, a forerunner of Program Evaluations and Review Technique (PERT), was a graphic display that allowed managers to see how work was progressing and take corrective action to keep projects on time and within budgetary al-lowances. Not until Taylor, Gantt, and other efficiency experts had made time and motion studies and test runs of each plant operation could cost standards be computed scientifically.
In 1915 Gantt examined the cost account-ing problems of idle time, overhead allocation, and standard cost setting. He popularized the idea that idle time represented a loss, not a le-gitimate production cost. Gantt favored ratable overhead cost allocations based on normal ca-pacity and considered historical product costs irrelevant. He considered that accountants ought to calculate what an item "should cost if the proper manufacturing methods were used and the shop were run at full capacity. This might be called the ideal cost, and toward its attainment all effort should be directed."
Michael Chatfield
Bibliography
Alford, L.P. Henry L. Gantt: Leader in Indus-try. New York: Harper and Row, 1934. Clark, Wallace. The Gantt Chart: A Working Tool of Management. New York: Ronald
Press, 1922. Gantt, H.L. Work, Wages, and Profits, 2nd ed. New York: Engineering Magazine Company, 1916.
. "The Relation Between Production
and Costs," Transactions: American So-ciety of Mechanical Engineers, vol. 38 (1915).
Garner, S.P. Evolution of Cost Accounting to 1925. University, AL: University of Ala-bama Press, 1954.
See also BUDGETING; COMMON COSTS; COST AND/OR MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING; ENGI-NEERING AND ACCOUNTING; STANDARD COST-ING; TAYLOR, FREDERICK WINSLOW
Garcke and Fells
In 1887 Emile Garcke, an English electrical engineer, and John Manger Fells, an incorpo-rated accountant, published Factory Accounts: Their Principles and Practice. This was the nine-teenth century's best known and most influen-tial work on cost accounting (it went through seven editions by 1922). Garcke and Fells' de-scription of the routine by which prime costs were passed through a series of ledger accounts from raw materials to finished goods sounds familiar and in fact has hardly been improved on. Materials and labor costs were transferred from stores and wages accounts to a summary manufacturing (work in process) account in the general ledger, which also received debits from the cashbook for expenditures directly appli-cable to the production process. Periodically, the prime costs of goods completed were trans-ferred from the manufacturing account to a stock (finished goods) account, leaving the
g a r c k e a n d f e l l s 2 69
Object Description
| Title |
History of accounting: An international Encyclopedia |
| Author |
Chatfield, Michael Vangermeersch, Richard |
| Subject |
Accounting -- History |
| Date-Issued | 1996 |
| Source | Originally published by Garland Publishing, Inc. |
| Rights | Copyright and permission to reprint held by: Academy of Accounting Hitorians |
| Type | Text |
| Format | PDF scanned at 400dpi with corrected OCR |
| Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Libraries. Accounting Collection |
| Date-Digitally Created | 2011 |
| Language | eng |
| Identifier | vangermeersch |
