Everything you need to streamline agency costs and expenditures. You've heard about the enormous savings potential of Activity-Based Cost Management (ABC/M) -- now it's time to put this powerful system to work in your organization. This 400+ page book guides you through every phase of activity-based accounting, from setting up a basic system through its organizational implementation. In one concise resource, you now have everything you need to streamline all aspects of your organization's costs and expenditures. Written in easy-to-understand language and clearly illustrated, Gary Cokins's book provides the financial techniques to determine the true and actual costs of services and cost rates; implement process improvements departmentally and organization-wide; evaluate the pros and cons of outsourcing and privatization decisions versus internal delivery; and align financial and budgetary activities to the organization's mission and strategic plan. As part of the Editor's Choice Series, this book is offered as a professional reference for SAS users. This title addresses concepts related to using SAS, but it is not specific to SAS and does not include SAS examples. 2001.

Managing The Cost of Government: Building An Effective Financial Management Structure

Federal finances are managed through an elaborate structure of decision processes and information systems. Many of these processes and systems, now obsolete face ever-increasing difficulties in coping with the demands placed upon them. The most visible evidence of difficulties is the enormous cost in time, energy, and public confidence involved in the annual search for consensus on the budget. Problems elsewhere in the structure that are less visible but equally real include: (1) the processes by which we decide how much to spend, and for what purposes, are cumbersome, repetitive, and time-consuming, (2) controls over how federal money is spend are detailed and burdensome, but they are routinely found to be ineffective in preventing abuses, and (3) budgeting, accounting, and management information stems often yield data that are unreliable, and all too often irrelevant.