A comparative study of activity-based costing system and the traditional system: A case study of Refah Bank

The goal of the present research is to study the activity-based costing system and the traditional system based on the volume comparatively in order to calculate the cost of the deposits in Refah Bank in Iran. Thus, first the deposit costs were calculated by using the volume based costing and then activity-based costing system was used to calculate the cost of deposits. In this research, the data from the whole branches of Refah Bank of Iran was used instead of focusing on the data gained from a limited number of branches. Also, regarding the existence of four different kinds of deposits, four different hypotheses were devised. Additionally, in an independent hypothesis, hypothesis 5, we studied the meaningfulness of the relationship between the ratio of staff's activities and the ratio of indirect costs of the deposits. The results show that there is not a meaningful difference between the cost calculated by activity-based costing and traditional method for current and saving deposits. But regarding the accounting calculations and the figure of cost ranking, there is a significant difference and activity-based costing system is absolutely more efficient than the traditional one. Also, the results of the research show that there is a meaningful difference between the cost calculated by activity-based costing and traditional system for long-term and other deposits. Also, the results of the research show that there is a meaningful relationship between the ratios of staff activities with overhead cost ratio for each of the deposits.   Key words: Activity-based costing (ABC), volume based costing, direct and indirect cost, over head appropriation bases.