4. What is the nature of cost? According to its nature, what kinds of costs can be divided into? Illustrate the characteristics and classification of various costs with examples.

The dependence between total cost and total business volume is usually called cost habit. The total cost here mainly refers to the operating costs incurred to obtain operating income, including all non-production costs such as production costs and sales expenses, management expenses and financial expenses.

All costs can be divided into three categories according to their types: fixed costs, variable costs and mixed costs.

Under the same time and space conditions, some cost items can be converted between fixed cost and variable cost. Therefore, when analyzing cost behavior, any enterprise should proceed from reality and analyze specific problems.

Extended data:

The basic condition for dividing product cost into fixed cost and variable cost is "relevant range hypothesis". But in the long run, any kind of cost can't be permanent, and it can't be linear with the business volume forever. Traditional cost classification is the embodiment of short-term goals and behaviors of traditional management accounting.

In addition, the traditional cost behavior simply treats the fixed cost as a short-term period, which inundates a lot of long-term and strategic important information and is difficult to truly reflect the performance of many activities of enterprises.