ACTIVITY-BASED COSTING AS AN ALTERNATIVE FOR THE EXISTING COST ACCOUNTING IN PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES IN POLAND – THE AUTHOR’S CONCEPTION OF IMPLEMENTING THIS COST ACCOUNTING AT THE UNIVERSITY

Abstract

The results of research concerning the usefulness of assessing the cost accounting system at public universities in Poland to effective cost management of their functioning, which was carried out by the author of the article indicated that this system does not meet the requirements of its users. Its assumptions and structure result from: • on the one hand – from a well-established in the theory of economics full cost accounting, in which all costs incurred in a unit in a given period should be referred to and settled on products and services manufactured, • on the other hand – from existing legal regulations of these units and from the needs of their financial reporting. So, the cost accounting system constructed in this way is of limited usefulness for the purposes of costs management of public universities in Poland. Therefore, for these units, it is reasonable to implement more advanced cost accounting, which is the Activity-Based Costing. According to the author of the article, this cost accounting will increase the information resources about factors that generate costs and their structure, and thus create more opportunities for more effective management of these entities. The main aim of this article is, therefore, to present the assumptions of the authors model of cost accounting in a public university, which contains all elements of the activity-based costing and the procedure for its implementation in the university. In the article, its three basic parts were distinguished. In the first part of the article, the assumptions and the structure of the activity-based costing in public university were presented both in the descriptive terms and in the form of the author model of this cost accounting. In turn, the procedure of the activity-based costing implementation was presented in the second part of the article. Considerations, which were presented in the final part of the article, concerning the assessment of the usefulness of the developed activity-based costing model for the needs in effective cost management in public universities in Poland are of the essence of the analyzed problem. The results of research carried out indicate that the implementation of the activity-based costing in public universities in Poland will significantly increase the information resources about costs incurred by them, which will undoubtedly improve the effective functioning of these units.