Did you know that you could be making important strategic financial decisions with only half your data? Most cost and revenue analysis inside institutions is ad-hoc, spreadsheet based, usually only considers direct costs or worse, a general apportionment of overhead that bears no relationship to actual overhead consumption.
A better approach is to have a systemized, institution-wide Full Cost model to support strategic and operational decision making. Full Cost models are important because they allow you to make strategic financial decisions by considering ALL your financial data and not just direct cost.
Full Cost models use Activity-Based Costing which is a method of distributing both direct and overhead cost (and revenue) using cause and effect drivers through the activities that consume the resources and down to the end products of an organization. For Higher Education that means calculating the full cost of teaching programs and courses as well as research, public service, commercial enterprises and sports programs.
If you are interested in piloting a Full Cost model at your institution we have developed a Full Cost Readiness and Implementation guide to help you work through this process based on over twenty years of building very large enterprise-wide models for Military and Oil/Gas sectors and ten years building models specifically for Higher Ed.
The guide will take you through the various stages of planning and implementing a Full Cost Model at your institution, this includes:
- An overview of the Higher Ed ABC Methodology
- Understanding and communicating the need for ABC
- Assessing Data Readiness
- Building a data culture
- Building Model Assumptions
- Developing your timeline
- Validate and Iterating the model
- Key Takeaways
Please click the button below to download our 42 page comprehensive guide.