A Summary of Historical Developments in Cost Accounting Kaplan draws on Johnson's work in this section who built on the work of Chandler, Littleton, Solomons and Garner. It appears that information needed for planning and control arose during the first half of the 19th century in textile mills and railroads, and then somewhat later in tobacco companies and metal-making industries. These developments are described in Chapter 2 of Relevance Lost. It is interesting and important to note that depreciation and the matching concept had not been developed at this time, so fixed costs were not allocated to products or periods. In addition, capital budgeting (discounted cash flow methods) had not been developed. Frederick Taylor and Hamilton Church were influential during the early 1900s in developing standards and measuring and allocating overhead costs to products. Break-even analysis was used in 1903. Church seems to have understood the concept we now refer to as activity-based costing in 1908, warning that all overhead cost should not be loaded onto products using direct labor as the cost allocation basis. In 1923, J. Maurice Clark wrote about many concepts that we still find in management accounting books today such as avoidable cost, differential costs and sunk costs. He also emphasized different cost for different purposes, using statistical methods to estimate cost behavior and the idea of keeping financial accounting information separate from cost accounting information (p. 396). Cost information was used for strategic decisions related to pricing and operating efficiency. Historical Development of Managerial Control In this section Kaplan describes how DuPont developed and decomposed the return on investment (ROI) measurement and used it as the "true test" of profit ...