Advantages of Marginal Costing:

Ø Cost Control: Practical cost control is greatly facilitated. By avoiding arbitrary allocation of fixed overhead, efforts can be concentrated on maintaining a uniform and consistent marginal cost useful to the various levels of management.

Ø Simplicity: Marginal Costing is simple to understand and operate; it can be combined with other forms of costing, such as, budgetary costing, standard costing without much difficulty.

Ø Elimination of varying charge per unit: In marginal Costing fixed overheads are not charged to the cost of production due to this the effect of varying charges per unit is avoided.

Ø Short-Term Profit Planning: It helps in short-term profit planning by break-even charts and profit graphs. Comparative profitability can be easily assessed and brought to the notice of the management for decision-making.

Ø Prevents Illogical Carry forwards: It prevents the illogical carry-forwards in stock-valuation of some proportion of current years fixed overhead.

Ø Accurate Overhead Recovery Rate: It eliminates large balances left in overhead control accounts, which indicate the difficulty of ascertaining an accurate overhead recovery rate.

Ø Maximum return to the business: The effects of alternative sales or production policies can be more readily appreciated and assessed, and decisions taken will yield the maximum return to the business.

Disadvantages of Marginal Costing:

Ø Misleading Results: It is very difficult to segregate all costs into fixed and variable costs very clearly, since all costs are variable in the long run. Hence such segregation sometimes may give misleading results.

Ø Distorted Picture of Profits: The closing stock consists of variable cost only and ignores fixed costs. This gives Distorted Picture of Profits.

Ø Avoids Semi-Variable Costs: Semi-Variable costs are not considered in the analysis.

Ø Problem of Recovery of Overheads: There is problem of under or over-recovery of overheads, since variable costs are apportioned on estimated basis and not on the actuals.

Ø Ignorance of Time Factor: Since the time factor is completely ignored; comparison of performance between two periods on the basis of contribution alone will give the misleading results.