Activity Based Costing In Financial Institutions: How To Support Value-Based Management And Manage Your Resources Effectively

Activity Based Costing offers a practical approach to implementing the ABC techniques. The goal of ABC is to identify the factors that drive expenditure and thus manage these costs more effectively. This book shows how to address the key issues that may arise in such developments, identify the activities which consume costs, develop strategic planning and management of resources, undertake cost reduction exercises and develop ABC operationally to include budgeting and performance management.

Reviews:

Activity-Based Costing and management information in financial institutions is an area I have been interested in for many years. It is difficult in one book to provide answers to every eventuality, but I have enjoyed the opportunity to provide some insights from my (and my colleagues) that may suggest ideas to others facing similar problems. I have included a basic methodology and guidance that we have found useful, but as with all MIS projects these tools do need to be tailored for each individual organisation. I hope you find it useful and I look forward to reading your reviews in the future.

The Activity Based Costing Methodology showed in this book, by itself, doesn't provide full answers to the challenges Financial Institutions have been facing. Of course, some simple and commom questions are addressed, adapted from manufacturing knowledge, but complex ones aren't.For example, the question "how can I compute IT costs to products, services, customers, distribution chanells?" can be answered in a correct way.As a "growing high tech consumer", financial services industry needs valuable answers to these questions. Since 1994, we've performing projects related to implementation of Advanced Cost and Budget Systems using ABC Costing. Recently, we've perfomed projects in 2 global Banks (top 10, assets), where we can focus in answer in a correct way these complex questions.However, I think the book is usefull for starting discussion about the theme in the financial institutions environment.Thank you.Christiano Mendonca, Brasil