2. COST ACCOUNTING CONCEPTS FOR IS ORGANIZATIONS › 2.4 Transaction Accounting › 2.4.2 Implementing Transaction Accounting › 2.4.2.2 Cost Accounting Systems

2.4.2.2 Cost Accounting Systems

Based on the usage statistics collected with the resource
measurement systems, cost accounting computes processing
costs to determine the cost of production.  The costing of
resources is a highly controversial area and will not be
covered in this section.  However, cost accounting provides
data center management with quantified costs for processing
batch programs, TSO commands, and IMS and CICS transactions.
The important point for the reader to understand is that this
step does not represent charge-out or billing, but only
determines the cost of processing.

In addition to knowing the costs for the individual programs,
commands, etc., the cost accounting system must have an
"explosion" facility that can aggregate the processing costs
of the jobs, programs, commands, transactions, etc., to
determine the total cost of a particular application.  The
following explosion table illustrates this process:


         PAYROLL CHECK GENERATION APPLICATION

   CATEGORY        IDENTIFIERS

   TSO             USERID=PAYROLL    COMMAND=PAYENTRY
   BATCH           JOB=PAYDAILY      PROGRAM=PAYEDIT
   BATCH           JOB=PAYDAILY      PROGRAM=SORT
   BATCH           JOB=PAYDAILY      PROGRAM=PAYUPDT


The cost accounting system calculates the processing costs
for each of the three batch steps and the one TSO command for
the accounting period, based on the usage quantified by the
resource measurement system.  By considering only the
procedures specified in the explosion table, the cost
accounting system then automatically accumulates all costs
for the four specified functions to arrive at the total cost
for processing the entire Payroll Check Generation
Application.