(economics) The total amount of money or goods expended in an endeavour. It is money paid out at some time in the past and recorded in journal entries and ledgers.
ACCOUNTING COST: The actual outlays or expenses incurred in production that shows up a firm's accounting statements or records. Accounting costs, while very important to accountants, company CEOs, shareholders, and the Internal Revenue Service, is only minimally important to economists. The reason is that economists are primarily interested in economic cost (also called opportunity cost). That fact is that accounting costs and economic costs aren't always the same. An opportunity or economic cost is the value of foregone production. Some economic costs, actually a lot of economic opportunity costs, never show up as accounting costs. Moreover, some accounting costs, while legal, bonified payments by a firm, are not associated with any sort of opportunity cost
Implicit///a. the out of pocket expense to hire resourcesb. the full cost of hiring workersc. taxes owed to the state and the federal governmentd. opportunity costs of using the firm's own resources A firm's use of its own capital. This is considered an implicit cost because the capital could have been rented to another firm instead. This rental income foregone, or the implicit rental rate of capital, is the firm's opportunity cost of using its own capital. This implicit rental rate can be broken down beyond interest forgone.
- A firm's use of its owner's time and/or financial resources
Another example of an implicit cost is the opportunity cost of a sole proprietor working in her own business. For example, Gina works as a sole proprietor and her business reported a net income of $30,000 for the year. Since a sole proprietor does not receive a salary or wages, there is no explicit cost reported for Gina’s work in her business. However, if Gina is foregoing a salary of $40,000 from another company, that is an implicit cost for