Cost respectively revenue type accounting creates transparency concerning the question “Where are which costs and revenues accrued?” which enables management of the IT organizational units in terms of budget compliance and economically reason­able behavior. Cost center accounting usually reflects the organizational structure of the IT of the cost, service, or profit center. In practice, starting as a cost or service center with the possibility to develop into a profit center can often be recommended. The herewith related lifting of the obligation to contract should be carried out step by step and after a trial period. From the standpoint of transparency, cost centers are transparent with ­respect to costs or investments, but tend to be rather lacking in transparency with regard to the services. Service centers, on the other hand, are transparent in both respects, while profit centers, owing to their orientation to external business, focus on the transparency of their services.

If cost center accounting and activity accounting are combined, questions about the profit of individual IT sectors, the utilization of their capacity, the market conformity of their unit costs, and the service relationships among the individual IT sectors can be answered. The performance of the individual IT sectors can be answered by means of activity accounting, enabling planning or demand oriented management of service capacities, in turn providing the basis for the identification of potential cost optimizations.

Cost unit accounting represents the counterpart to the ­strategically oriented portfolio controlling at the operating ­level. For this purpose, a cost unit is set up, usually for a limited time, for each individual unit (project, product, contract) and ­assigned its calculation values so that it is possible to make statements about the profitability of a product (product controlling), a customer contract (contract controlling), or a project (project controlling).

Service structure and reference figures used are decisive for effective activity accounting

The major success factors for effective activity accounting are the structure of the services such as network services, data center operations, or applications management as well as the ­definition of the correct reference figures for the unit costs. The most important cost drivers for the specific service, e.g. the PC workplace for desktop services, should be selected as the reference figure. On the other hand, technical reference values, partly in very great detail, are frequently used for data center services so that different SLA classes of a service can be reflected in the ­price model, whereby a tendency towards user or business ­oriented models can be noted here as well. The structure of the services and the definition of the reference figures for unit costs are ­decisive with respect to the creation of benchmarkable structures and to the avoidance of step-fixed overhead costs.