15-24 Direct and step-down allocation. [Excel template] (LO 4)E-books, an online book retailer, has two operating divisionscorporate sales and consumer salesand two support divisionshuman resources and information systems. Each sales division conducts merchandising and marketing operations independently. E-books uses number of employees to allocate human resources costs and processing time to allocate information systems costs. The following data are available for September:

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The table is as follows.

Allocation Methods	Support Divisions, Human Resources	Support Divisions, information systems	Operating Divisions, Corporate Sales	Operating Divisions, Consumer Sales
Budgeted costs incurred before any interdivision cost allocations	$82,700	$234,400	$998,270	$489,860
Support work supplied by human resources division	Blank	Blank	Blank	Blank
Budgeted number of employees	Blank	21	42	28
Support work supplied by information systems division	Blank	Blank	Blank	Blank
Budgeted processing time, in minutes	320	Blank	1,920	1,600

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1. Allocate the support divisions' costs to the operating divisions using the direct method.
2. Rank the support divisions based on the percentage of their services provided to other support divisions. Use this ranking to allocate the support divisions' costs to the operating divisions based on the step-down method.
3. How could you have ranked the support divisions differently?

Check Figure: 1. Allocation of HR costs to consumer sales division, $33,080