SOFTWARE AND PLANNING PROCESS
What Is FullCost?
Concept
FullCost is an integrated business planning, budgeting, and rate-setting application and method.
* Budgets are based on a business plan -- what resources it will take to fulfill next year's commitments.
* Rates (for chargebacks/allocations/competitive comparisons) are drawn from the same data, and thus are fully consistent.They are automatically adjusted when the business plan and budget are changed.
* FullCost is for budget planning/negotiating and rate-setting, not tracking. The final budget is uploaded into your corporate applications for aggregation and for tracking.
FullCost forecasts the true cost to shareholders/taxpayers/donors of individual products/services, as well as traditional GL expense codes, for each group/department and for the organization as a whole.
* By costing actual products/services, it goes well beyond activity-based budgeting and "driver-based budgeting." This is fundamental to making informed budget decisions, managing expectations, and combating the "do more with less" impossible promise.
* It incorporates principles of activity-based costing, zero-based budgeting, and generally-accepted accounting principles (GAAP). All calculations represent the true cost to shareholders.
* Costs are comparable to outsourcing (like for like). For example, FullCost distinguishes corporate-good activities from client products and services, costs which are not imbedded in outsourcing rates.
FullCost application software runs on top of Excel to provide a flexible, understandable, easy-to-use planning environment.
Deliverables
The FullCost software is implemented in-house, for use in the current and future annual planning processes.
The implementation process trains your leadership team in the business-planning process, which delivers:
* A service catalog, both for external and internal products and services. (If you already have one, it's revalidated and refined in the FullCost process.)
* A business plan that forecasts "sales" for the year ahead and plans the resources needed to fulfill those sales.
* A budget for your products and services (as well as the traditional budget for expense code by manager). This budget may be the basis for allocations (if any).
* Rates for all products and services in the service catalog, for the purpose of costing new projects, TCO analysis, external benchmarking, and chargebacks (if any).
What's In the FullCost Tool-kit?
The FullCost tool-kit includes everything you need to transform your planning and budgeting process:
The FullCost software structures all the inputs, amortizes indirect costs and overhead, generates reports for your managers to scrutinize frugality, produces final reports for executive reviews, and formats the data for upload into the accounting system.
The FullCost documentation provides detailed guidance for each step, including definitions, frameworks, decision trees, trade-offs,workshop agendas, suggested time frames, and helpful hints.
In short, the FullCost tool-kit includes:
Excel-based application software for each manager
Excel-based application software for the planning/budget manager to assemble results
350 page handbook
More on the contents of the FullCost tool-kit....
