For this reason, traditional based costing systems misrepresent the cost of the product. In other words, it is assumed that every time a unit of product is manufactured, a cost is incurred. The method is not entirely useless and can be used on certain direct costs. However, for tasks that are not performed directly on the product, the method is imperfect at best. This is due to the fact that most businesses today are made up of more complicated cost and activity drivers. The traditional cost accounting system ends up with the cost of goods sold on an absorption costing basis and includes production costs that can only be used in external reporting. “Fundamentally, traditional costing systems attempt to assign costs directly to products, rather than first to activities and then from activities to product units. The typical cost report provides information on how much is spent, but not why it is spent” (Marx, 2009). As stated earlier, job order costing is one of the traditional systems and is used when many different jobs or products are processed in each period. Some examples of companies using traditional cost accounting include greeting card companies, commercial aircraft manufacturing, major construction companies, the medical services industry, law firms, and retail companies. Process cost accounting is also a traditional accounting system used when similar unit production costs cannot be mass produced