CONVICT LABOii FOE ROAD WORK. 37 
The per capita cost of maintenance per calendar day being thus 
developed, the second set of accounts is necessary to determine the 
unit and total costs of work. The cost of maintenance per individual 
work day, which is equivalent to the cost per calendar day corrected 
for unproductive labor and lost time, should be treated as the wage 
of labor, and should figure in the cost of construction. In addition 
there must be a careful record of wages directly paid to officers and 
hired employees, of the cost of teams used on construction work, of 
materials consumed in the construction, of depreciation of tools and 
machinery employed, and of the amount and proper allocation of 
what are known as overhead expenses. All of these items entering 
into the cost of the work should be properly accredited to the par- 
ticular operations and parts of the work to which they are applied. 
For example, the records should be complete enough to show in the 
case of the construction of a macadam road not only the total cost of 
the road, but also the itemized cost of clearing and grubbing, grading, 
quarrying rock, crushing rock, spreading surfacing material, rolling, 
etc. The keeping of such records implies the determination of the 
amounts of the various kinds of work, such as the cubic yardage of 
earthwork, the square yardage of surface, the area cleared and grubbed 
in acres, etc. Without such a determination of the amount of work 
done any system of cost accounting is valueless as an aid in the 
improvement of methods of work. 
The accounts comprised under the above classification are neces- 
sary for the determination of unit costs of maintenance and construc- 
tion. In addition to these, certain operating forms are necessary, 
such as the usual forms of requisition and order blanks and inven- 
tory sheets, and a system of books suitable for recording the busi- 
ness incident to the work. These may consist of the old form of 
journal and ledger, or more suitably of a system of voucher files and 
records to replace the ledger. 
In the design of the forms to serve the various purposes outlined 
above it is essential to bear in mind not only what information it is 
desired to record, but also the desirability of presenting that infor- 
mation in logical and orderly manner and of so regulating and stand- 
ardizing the size of sheets as to permit of their convenient use and 
proper filing in a systematic manner. Large forms are cumbersome, 
and irregular sizes are difficult to file properly. 
Forms 1 to 12 represent a series of report and record forms 
designed in accordance with the above principles. They are 
presented as concrete examples to illustrate the technical methods 
of securing the desirable information. It is not expected that 
they will meet entirely the requirements of any particular sys- 
tem, but it is believed that they are correct in principle, and with 
suitable modifications can be readily adapted to the use of any State 
