Janell's reply to the thread rang my Alert bell and prompted me to re-read some posts. Thanks, Ms J!
I think (look out!) that in today's work environments, whether civic, NFP, or for profit, we need a higher
level of managerial scrutiny of our physical assets and other things on which money needs to be spent... And that leads up to the fab world of Cost Accounting. Very much one of those "the devil is in the details" things is what we *really* spend to do some things or to avoid doing other things.
In my earlier example of "if a
unit costs $300 to replace" vs an unknown number of hours @$50/hr to maintain it, at what
point do we decide to replace? What was left out earlier was the presumption that $300 reflected the total cost of replacement, not just the
purchase price of a new
unit. That includes purchasing overhead, receiving personnel and installation labor, any new or altered infrastructure, i.e the *full* costs. Sometimes we keep fixing old stuff because replacing the supporting infrastructure is much, much more costly or impractical. Ex. ConEd was still supplying
direct current power to the Broadway theater district until the 1970s, IIRC.
In order to make those decisions, though, we need to have a defensible history and projection of costs, and those come from cost accounting.
Add to your News Years "gifting to myself"
holiday list: any
book with a name like "cost accounting for complete idiots". Seriously.
{optional story}
I started out as a 1 man sound company with a Ford Econoline (in a previous century, too) way overloaded with PA. I made a number of business mistakes that meant an income that would not increase and there were no funds for re-investment and upgrades. Eventually I took the first rock band out of town for a different set of misadventures (those for another time). Several acts and thousands of miles later I decided a bed that did not move was a good idea, so I doubled down on my previous and limited business and accounting classes from school, sold off most of my personal audio gear, and went about managing other people's sound & lighting shops. While I did better than some of the owners I worked for, some were teaching me tons of stuff about management of personnel and physical assets in ways that simple classroom experience did not convey. That's when the
went on over my head about cost accounting. I'm not a
wizard but I've read the books and work on using what I've learned. Lots of ways to lose value and money...
{/optional story}
