Level costing

Most activity-based costing will be executed from the lowest level upwards; therefore for each parent activity involved in costing, the cost should be updated from the child level and repeated as you move up to the highest level. This ensures that activity cost contributions are reflected accurately at each level of detail.

However, when a cost report is generated, all costing information is returned for all levels within a specified scope of diagrams. This might result in inaccurate costing information as the lowest level cost information and the higher levels, which already include the lower level costs, are calculated. For this reason, costing reports can be exported into a third-party spreadsheet application, for example Microsoft Excel, and manipulated further.

For example, the costing of a process comes from 3 levels in a map and these diagram references are as follows:

1.1.1  1.2.1  1.3.1

1.1.2  1.2.2  1.3.2

1.1.3  1.2.3  1.3.3

If this report was exported to Excel as a CSV file, the rows relating to the higher level diagrams (for example 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, etc) can be deleted. The remaining columns can then be calculated to obtain the total process costs, durations and FTEs, or manipulate the data to calculate other measures, produce charts and statistical analysis with rich reporting features in third-party software. You can also take the reports in full, or configured, and import into project management applications such as MS Project.

Exporting costing as CSV