Hirons Air uses two measures of activity, flights and passengers, in the cost formulas in its budgets and performance reports. The cost formula for plane operating costs is $57,590 per month plus $2,984 per flight plus $16 per passenger. The company expected its activity in November to be 84 flights and 256 passengers, but the actual activity was 87 flights and 258 passengers. The actual cost for plane operating costs in November was $310,690. The spending variance for plane operating costs in November would be closest to:

Your take on decision making process

Onsider the following subscription behavior information from genie, a web site that provides tools for constructing a family tree (ancestor search). subscriptions cost $9.99 per month, but you are charged for the entire year at the time of purchase. there is a one-year minimum term when you sign up for the service. once purchased, subscriptions are set to renew automatically unless the subscriber cancels them. when a membership renews, it renews for a one-year term and again you are charged for the entire year. there are no variable costs associated with providing this service to an individual customer, but genie does engage in customer relationship activities that they believe will increase customer retention. these customer relationship activities cost genie about $10 per year per customer. based on a sample of 1000 customers that joined genie five years ago, near the time when the company was founded, they were able to determine how many of those customers remained subscribers in the second year, third year etc. based on this information, genie calculated the average annual retention rate to be 20%. genie uses an annual discount rate of 8%. a. last year, genie spent $10,000 placing advertisements on google. genie management believes that these advertisements were responsible for about 300 new subscribers. would you recommend to genie management that they purchase more google ads? b. suppose a newly-introduced loyalty program increases the number of customers that remained to 30%. does this new data change your answer to 9.a? c. do you have any hesitations or concerns about making recommendations to management based on your above estimate of customer lifetime value?

howard, fine, & howard is an advertising agency. the firm uses an activity-based costing system to allocate overhead costs to its services. information about the firm's activity cost pool rates follows: stooge company was a client of howard, fine, & howard. recently, 7 administrative assistant hours, 3 new ad campaigns, and 8 meeting hours were incurred for the stooge company account. using the activity-based costing system, how much overhead cost would be allocated to the stooge company account?