Activity-based management systems in higher education

Financial pressures facing UK universities have increased the demand for good financial management information. The government wants higher education institutions to adopt standardized full economic costing. This article describes an activity-based management (ABM) model which has been successfully used to cost institutions' activities down to appropriate levels of focus, linking the activities to income streams and arriving at a form of value added. The model is extremely flexible allowing information to be collected for different levels of focus: faculty, department, programme, module/project or support unit.