I was thrilled to be invited to present at the 2022 Australian University Senior Finance Officers Group (AUSFOG) conference last week alongside Thomas King from Microsoft. I was asked to present the reports that finance departments are actually using, so we took a look at 12 months of Power BI usage data to see which […]
READ MOREStagflation: An economic situation in which prices keep rising but economic activity does not increase (Cambridge Dictionary) TLDR High Inflation hasn’t been around since the 70’s and 80’s. During periods of high inflation focus on defending margins and cashflow. This requires sophisticated and detailed Activity-Based Cost models (which were prolific in the 80’s and 90’s). […]
READ MORETLDR! Activity-Based Costing (ABC) concepts have been around for yonks! (Australian/British slang for a long time) Ever since the 1770’s. ABC concepts have been largely ignored for yonks! ABC was formalized in the 1980’s. ABC is needed more than even now given the increasing complexity of modern business models and the growth of overhead to […]
READ MOREWith Covid-19 striking the university sector hard (and suddenly) last year, the Commonwealth Government postponed the need for the university sector to provide their 2019 ‘Transparency in Higher Education Expenditure’ submission. However, despite the ongoing impact to the sector in 2021, the decision was made to not only ask for the 2019 data, but also […]
READ MOREFinancial analysts use a wide range of cost allocation methods, including cost per student credit hour, in universities to calculate the cost of delivering courses and programs. I will show you why this is fraught with danger and could cause more harm than good! In recent posts I have used data from our Australian demonstration […]
READ MOREQuick Thoughts Costing is Management Accounting. Costing requires Operations and/or Engineering expertise. Cost is modelled. e.g. Activity-Based Costing. Cost comes in many forms – Financial Cost, Environmental Cost, Social Cost. It’s important to understand what CAUSES cost so you can manage it appropriately. Cost is calculated by identifying where resources are used to undertake work […]
READ MOREIn times of financial crisis, low enrolment courses are usually targets for removal. But removing the wrong courses could lead to a worse financial position! Due to the financial impacts of the current pandemic, institutions are taking a serious look at all of their programs and courses to determine their financial performance. The typical targets […]
READ MORELast week we were invited to present our regular solution to a university technical team. Lots of analytical and IT skills in the group and one of the attendees asked a very important question “What can you do that we can’t?”. What a great question and one that we should be answering all the time […]
READ MOREDue to the pandemic, a lot of institutions are seriously reviewing their Academic Programs. In this video we’ll take you through a quick example of how our models can be used to support the Program Review process.
READ MOREEverything you do has some type of cost associated with it. If you want to drive to the shops, you need a vehicle which you either purchased with cash, or you are paying off a loan, or you leased the vehicle. Then the vehicle requires fuel, oil, water and associated maintenance. All the things you […]
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