standard cost card
A recipe card lists, line by line, exactly what one dish requires: so much flour, so many eggs, this long in the oven. Anyone can pick up the card and see what one serving 'should' take. A standard cost card is the accounting equivalent — a one-page summary that lists, line by line, what one unit of a product should cost.
Concretely, a standard cost card sets out for a single unit each input's standard quantity, its standard price, and the resulting standard cost, then totals them. A typical card for one backpack might read: direct materials 1.5 meters of fabric at 8 = 12; direct labor 0.4 hours at 25 = 10; variable overhead 0.4 hours at 5 = 2; fixed overhead 0.4 hours at 7.5 = 3; total standard cost per backpack = 27. The card is simply the organized record of the standards that variance analysis later draws on.
It matters because it is the reference document the whole standard-costing system leans on: it tells the production budget what inputs are needed, lets inventory be valued at standard cost, and provides the 'should cost' that every variance is measured against. When actual results come in, accountants compare them to the card to compute price and quantity variances. A common misunderstanding is to treat the card as the actual cost — it is the planned, benchmark cost; the whole point of variance analysis is that real life deviates from the card, and those deviations are what you study.
A T-shirt maker's standard cost card reads: cloth 0.5 kg at 6 = 3.00; labor 0.2 hours at 15 = 3.00; overhead 0.2 hours at 4 = 0.80; total standard cost 6.80 per shirt. When the month's actual cloth bill works out to 3.40 a shirt, the card's 3.00 is the benchmark that turns the 0.40 gap into a materials variance worth investigating.
A one-unit recipe of standard quantities and prices, totaling the standard cost.
The card shows what a unit should cost, not what it did cost. Reading it as actual cost defeats its purpose, which is to be the benchmark that actual costs are compared against.