What is a break even chart

A chart? Something your book decided to call a chart. Seriously, I know of nothing official called a "break even chart."

Are you perhaps referring to a graph of sorts? Make sure you call it exactly what the book does. If it's calling something a "chart," look in the glossary and give us a definition. My suspicions are that it may be a CVP graph, but books can do all kinds of stuff that are specific to that book and we don't know what it is.

A chart? Something your book decided to call a chart. Seriously, I know of nothing official called a "break even chart."

Are you perhaps referring to a graph of sorts? Make sure you call it exactly what the book does. If it's calling something a "chart," look in the glossary and give us a definition. My suspicions are that it may be a CVP graph, but books can do all kinds of stuff that are specific to that book and we don't know what it is.

British authors use the word 'chart' in place of graph.

British authors use the word 'chart' in place of graph.

Ah...

Well, here's an example of a CVP graph.

EDITED: I just copied that from another site without thinking and just realized it was a violation of their copyright, so I'm removing it. I could just link to it instead, but the link rehmanvohra provided has a gazillion of them to look at, so no big deal.

That is correct. As I said the British Authors refer to this graph as a chart. I would suggest reading a British authority on Cost and Management Accounting such as Colin Drury. I have copied the following text from Rapid revision, teaching and e-learning resources for Business Education & the Humanities (http://www.tutor2u.net) for you.

Introduction to break-even analysis

The Break-Even Chart

In its simplest form, the break-even chart is a graphical representation of costs at various levels of activity shown on the same chart as the variation of income (or sales, revenue) with the same variation in activity. The point at which neither profit nor loss is made is known as the "break-even point" and is represented on the chart below by the intersection of the two lines:

You may also wish to refer to the following link:

http://images.google.com.pk/images?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&hs=1Ui&q=Break+Even+Chart&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ei=uzyOSv2bPMmJkQXg34m7Cg&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=4