3 i4 APPENDIX. 



miscellaneous is the product, and hence the more necessary the 

 knowledge of its difference in cost, the more difficult is this 

 knowledge to obtain. A system which might serve a blast fur- 

 nace would utterly fail in a repair shop, yet are not the accounts 

 of repair shops often kept on blast-furnace principles ? 



It would seem that the practice of estimating costs would not 

 be followed if a more positive method were available at a reason- 

 able price. 



The world has been working too long with existing methods . 

 for any one to hope to improve them ; the change must be one 

 of methods. I propose to replace the ordinary ex post facto 

 analysis of expenses by a preliminary analysis of objects of 

 expense, to be followed by a synthesis of items of expense, made 

 mechanically by sorting cards, on which the objects of expense 

 have been indicated at the time of expenditure, by the persons 

 who most probably knew them best, in symbols significant to 

 the least experienced compiler. 



By thus defining every charge for labor and material, our 

 accounts are, so to speak, balanced in advance, and it only 

 remains to distinguish between specific and general expenses 

 and properly to apportion the general expenses among the spe- 

 cific, in order to obtain the most probable cost of any specific 

 object. 



III. 



A manufactory may be functionally divided into two main 

 portions, the workshops and the office. 



In the shops are performed the processes, with the records of 

 which the office is principally concerned ; on one side stands 

 the foreman expending labor in transforming material ; on the 

 other sits the clerk recording the results of the other's acts. 

 Taking these two as typical figures, I propose : 



1. To require the highest local authority to define the objects, 

 on which its resources are to be expended. In other words, 

 what accounts are to be opened. 



2. To require the foreman to define the object most probably 

 benefiting by the expenditure which he directs, as nearly as 

 possible at the time that the expenditure is made. 



