Business process overhead - Definition and Overview

Business process overhead is the amount of resources used by an organization just to maintain existence. Overhead costs are usually measured in monetary terms, but non-monetary overhead is possible in the form of time required to accomplish tasks.

Examples of business process overhead include the payment of rent on the office space a business occupies, the electricity bill to power the lights in the office, and to some degree, the wages of the personnel working in that office.

Examples of non-overhead costs are incremental costs. These include a the cost of supplies used to create the goods a business sells.

It might be questionable to assert that the cost of 10 extra people on the sales force are an incremental cost or an overhead cost, since the wages for these people are both overhead and incremental.