reply to these two discussion posts

When accounting for all of the costs of production, managers must look at both direct and indirect costs. Direct costs often are variable costs. Since variable costs have to do directly with providing your product or service, they increase as your business manufactures and sells more products or provides more services, or they even tend to decrease if your business takes a downturn and slows production.Direct costs are costs accrued for a specific purpose. For example, when producing automobiles, the tires, engine and other parts used for the automobiles as well as the wages paid to the workers assembling the automobiles are direct costs. Indirect costs affect the entire company, not just one product. They include advertising, depreciation, office supplies, accounting services, and utilities. Indirect costs often are called overhead. Overhead covers all of the ongoing costs of operating a business that isn't directly associated with the making of the product or the offering of the service. It becomes very important to correctly classify direct and indirect costs so you can determine the firm's profitability, efficiency, and potential areas for cost improvement If i were a manager, I would classify all things that make up the actual final product as direct costs and the supporting materials or labor as indirect costs. Things like raw materials, screws, nuts & bolts, the actual machines used to make the final product and the laborers who physically produce it would all be direct costs. The maintenance for the machines, quality control laborers, packaging and shipping would all be considered indirect costs