cost variation

In fact, stakeholder providers are only allowed to charge a fixed maximum percentage, so there's very little cost variation on which to base a decision."

The weighting of such factors, which is defined by the realized degree of importance of each component in the specific index (or sub-index), aims to represent the costs variations typically found for chemical plants.

Top officials at the State University of New York are considering charging different tuition rates at undergraduate campuses, which could signify a break with the state's long-held philosophy that cost variations should play no role in students' decisions on which SUNY school to attend.

An important part of standard cost accounting is a variance analysis, which breaks down the variation between actual cost and standard costs into various components (volume variation, material cost variation, labor cost variation, etc.) so managers can understand why costs were different from what was planned and take appropriate action to correct the situation.