Luxury Furniture designs and builds factory-made, premium, wood armoires for homes. All are of white oak. Its budgeted manufacturing overhead costs for the year 2017 are as follows.

Overhead Cost Pools	Amount
Purchasing	$ 45,000
Handling materials	50,000
Production (cutting, milling, finishing)	130,000
Setting up machines	85,000
Inspecting	60,000
Inventory control (raw materials and finished goods)	80,000
Utilities	100,000
Total budgeted overhead costs	$550,000

For the last 4 years, Luxury Furniture has been charging overhead to products on the basis of materials cost. For the year 2017, materials cost of $500,000 were budgeted. Jim Brigham, owner-manager of Luxury Furniture, recently directed his accountant, Bob Borke, to implement the activity-based costing system that he has repeatedly proposed. At Jim Brigham’s request, Bob and the production foreman identify the following cost drivers and their usage for the previously budgeted overhead cost pools.

Overhead Cost Pools	Activity Cost Drivers	Expected Use of Cost Drivers
Purchasing	Number of orders	500
Handling materials	Number of moves	5,000
Production (cutting, milling, finishing)	Direct labor hours	65,000
Setting up machines	Number of setups	1,000
Inspecting	Number of inspections	4,000
Inventory control (raw materials and finished goods)	Number of components	40,000
Utilities	Square feet occupied	50,000

Debbie Steiner, sales manager, has received an order for 12 luxury armoires from Thom’s Interior Design. At Debbie’s request, Bob prepares cost estimates for producing 12 armoires so Debbie can submit a contract price per armoire to Thom’s. He accumulates the following data for the production of 12 armoires.

Direct materials	$5,200
Direct labor	$3,500
Direct labor hours	200
Number of purchase orders	3
Number of material moves	32
Number of machine setups	4
Number of inspections	20
Number of components	640
Number of square feet occupied 320 Instructions (a) Compute the predetermined overhead rate using traditional costing with materials cost as the basis. (b) What is the manufacturing cost per armoire under traditional costing? (c) What is the manufacturing cost per armoire under the proposed activity-based costing? (Prepare all of the necessary schedules.) (d) Which of the two costing systems is preferable in pricing decisions and why?