Costs in general:Cost objectives

          Accountants usually define costs as resources sacrificed or foregone to achieve a specific objective. For now, consider costs as being measured in the conventional accounting way, as monetary units (for example, dollars) that must be paid for goods and services. To guide decisions, the manager wants data pertaining to a variety of purposes. He or she wants the cost of something. This something may be a product, a group of products, a service rendered to a hospital patient or a bank customer, a machine-hour, a social-welfare project, a mile of road, or any conceivable activity. We call this a cosl objective and define it as any activity for which a separate measurernent of costs is desired.