From the Australian Navy to Universities. Reducing implementations from multiple years to multiple weeks. The perception that Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is overly complex, prone to failure, and largely abandoned was once widely held and, unfortunately, not without basis. However, the landscape of ABC has significantly transformed over the past two decades, marking substantial advancements in […]
READ MOREActivity-Based Costing (ABC) can provide tremendous insight into the financial performance of your organization. However, it has had a checkered past due to factors including the complexity of models and the large amount of manual effort required to maintain these models. Activity-Based Costing also fell out of favor due to very low interest rates and […]
READ MOREThere has been a remarkable surge in Artificial Intelligence (AI) usage, generating a significant amount of news and interest. The utilization of ChatGPT has skyrocketed, and new tools emerge regularly, aiding in the creation of images, videos, music, and short films. Microsoft has introduced their co-pilots to assist with code generation, writing Word documents, creating […]
READ MOREWhile reading EDUCAUSE’s latest article on the Top 10 IT issues for 2023, I came across the top-ranked issue – A Seat at the Table, which emphasizes the importance of ensuring that IT leadership is a full partner in institutional strategic planning. Given the current economic climate, with increasing interest rates and inflation, Strategic Cost […]
READ MOREOK, so I’m a little late with my “Best Of 2022” post, given it’s almost the end of January now, but I believe I’m still allowed to say “Happy New Year” as long as I post this in January it’s all good! So, Happy New Year to you all. I’ve analyzed the data for […]
READ MOREI 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 MOREWe are proud to announce the launch of our new modelling solution, Rapid Insights. We developed Rapid Insights as a low risk, low cost entry into advanced financial analytics for Higher Education. The objective is to build a model of the entire institution in only days, rather than months or years. The exact number of […]
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 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 […]
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