Standard methods continue to emphasize labor efficiency even though that resource now constitutes a (very) small part of the cost in most cases.
One of the first authors to foresee standard costing was the British accountant George P. Norton in his 1889 Textile Manufacturers' Bookkeeping.
[5] John Whitmore, a disciple of Alexander Hamilton Church, is credited for actually presenting "...the first detailed description of a standard cost system..."[6] in 1906/08.
The Anglo-American management consultant G. Charter Harrison is credited for designing one of the earliest known complete standard cost systems in the early 1910s.
Workers often did not know how many hours they would work in a week when they reported on Monday morning because time-keeping systems (based in time book) were rudimentary.
Traditional approaches limit themselves by defining cost behavior only in terms of production or sales volume.