Design and Application of a Costing Framework to Improve Planning and Management of HIV/AIDS Programs. Special Initiatives Report No. 29

摘要

HIV/AIDS-related interventions can be enhanced by management cost accounting, a range of accounting and analysis techniques enabling cost-conscious management decisions in a specific organization or program. While traditional accounting rigorously adheres to generally accepted accounting principles, management accounting is more discretionary and, as such, open to adjustment and customization required by particular users and applications. Efficiency gains from management accounting in the HIV/AIDS area may be significant, given the rapidly increasing amount of funding and the choice of alternative management options in the implementation of most interventions. Selected international programs focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and care in Cambodia participated in the validation of an activity-based costing (ABC) methodology, an important technique of management accounting whose purpose is to provide program managers and their funding agencies with uniform guidelines for allocation of costs to activities. The guidelines include a standardized list of activities by major intervention, a list of activity lines, a standardized cost classification system, a set of cost drivers to trace indirect costs to activity centers, and a program management agenda that can be addressed with cost information generated by ABC.