The Steps of Designing an IT-embedded Costing System for Higher Education Institutions

The article presents steps of constructing a computer-based costing system for a higher education institution. Activity-based costing was chosen as the underlying cost accounting methodology. The structure of the costing model for a hypothetic university was described in the paper. The model was created in an attempt to find out how costly is a process of education performed for a study programme, with particular attention given to how high are costs of delivering particular courses, and how costly it is to educate a group of students in each semester. Significant emphasis was put on the model implementation in the information technology environment. The Oros Modeler – a component of SAS Activity-Based Management package – was used as the modeling and calculating software. Finally, results of the costing procedure performed with the use of assumed data were presented.