Increasing transactions between firms, such as the exchange of materials and information, are the reason for the “hidden factory,” meaning high manufacturing overhead costs (Miller and Vollmann, 1985). Traditional cost accounting practices (e.g., volume-based costing) have been unable to allocate these costs to products accordingly (Dickinson and Lere, 2003; Thyssen et al., 2006; Uskonen and Tenhiälä, ۲۰۱۲). Yet accurate cost data is crucial for decision-making and has been seen as a source of competitive advantage (Gupta and Galloway, 2003; Berling, 2008; Lin et al., 2012; Maiga et al., 2014). Cooper and Kaplan (1988) presented activity-based costing (ABC) as an alternative cost accounting approach. Initially, ABC was intended to be implemented for intra-firm purposes only (La Londe and Pohlen, 1996). However, the reduction of a company’s own contribution to a product’s value due to outsourcing (McCarthy and Anagnostou, 2004; Schulze et al., 2012) resulted in more transactions at the interorganizational level (Weber et al., 2010). Furthermore, global competition has increased and puts pressure on firms and their supply chains (Khataie et al., 2011; Askarany et al., 2010). Today, not only individual firms but also whole supply chains compete against each other. Consequently, the need for coordinated activities, as well as information sharing, within and across supply chains has arisen (Schulze et al., 2012). Supply chain management (SCM) supports firms to manage inter-company material, information, and financial flows to collectively enhance productivity, performance, and profitability (Gunasekaran et al., 2004; Templar et al., 2016). Efforts today to improve competitiveness include suppliers and customers. Cost transparency across the supply chain, in addition to appropriate customer service levels, is seen as a crucial success factor (Hoffjan et al., 2011). ABC has been the subject of general reviews that describe its evolution (e.g. Innes et al., 2000; Bjørnenak and Mitchell, 2002), discuss its organizational aspects (Shields, 1995; Krumwiede, 1998), or examine its communication patterns (Lukka and Granlund, 2002). Various attempts have been made to integrate SCM and ABC (Lin et al., 2001), while the inter-organizational nature and the relational context represent the main characteristics (Cooper and Slagmulder, 2004). Thus far, the intersecting literature of SCM and ABC has not been reviewed. So, the contribution of this paper is to provide the current status and future directions of ABC in SCM. As the concept of ABC remains stable, whereas the terms “supply chain” and “SCM” still experience confusion regarding their meaning (Mentzer et al., 2001; Carter et al., 2015), this paper focuses on different ABC adoption levels within various “understandings” of the supply chain and SCM, respectively.