ACT 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.
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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.