Hello, I am a PhD student with an engineering background, researching R&D and artificial intelligence. Currently, in my new product development (NPD) project, I have been assigned a task: to verify the current standard costing methods applicable to such activities.

My confusion lies in the fact that, after consulting books and papers, I have found that there is no universally accepted list of standard costing methods. Some literature mentions some methods, others mention different ones, and still others scatter the methods throughout entire books, and so on. I simply need a list of costing methods that can achieve consensus.

So far, I have preliminarily compiled the following methods:

  • Activity-Based Costing (ABC)
  • Analogy Costing
  • Direct Costing

Additionally, my list also includes the following two items:

  • Life Cycle Costing
  • Target Costing

However, my supervisor pointed out that these methods are not strictly "methodologies"... but he did not clearly tell me which ones are. He suggested that I introduce target costing as an additional method for defining product cost/price, but I still do not know where to find the relevant basis.

I urgently need help! The rest of my thesis is mostly complete, but I need this list to explain the theory behind each costing method.

Thank you in advance for your answer.