Harry Whipple, owner of an ink jet printer, has agreed to allow Mary and Natalie, two friends who are pursuing a Masters degree in English, to print several papers for their graduate English courses. However, he has imposed two conditions. First, they must supply their own paper. Second, they must pay Harry a fair amount for the usage of the ink cartridge. Cartridges for the printer cost $80 and usually provide a printing capacity of 4,000 normal pages before replacement (normal means a page without graphs). Paper is bought in reams of 500 units at $4.00 per ream. Mary’s printing requirements are for 500 pages, while Natalie’s are for 1,000 pages.

Required:

1. Calculate the cost per page for the papers produced by Mary. Repeat for Natalie.

2. In computing the cost per page, which cost was assigned through direct tracing? through driver tracing?

3. Suppose that Natalie uses a lot of graphs in her writing (Mary uses hardly any).

Explain how this could affect the accuracy of the ink cost assigned to Natalie.

What recommendation would you make to improve the cost assignment? Explain. lop25