Standard costs

All costs used in Learning and Development must be defined as standard costs.

• Costs are maintained only at the activity level. The individual resource activity costs are not tracked by the system.

• You can associate only flat-amount or activity-specific costs to an activity.

• Any costs flagged as "Include in Catalog" will be added up and the total displayed on the catalog.

  Note: Only total costs of the same currency can be displayed. If flagged costs are not in the same currency, no costs are displayed.

Standard costs are costs that can be added to an activity. For example, your organization can estimate the standard cost of meals when the activity takes place externally, or standard pedagogical rates for activities.

You can define standard costs in multiple currencies and activities can also be associated with standard costs in multiple currencies.

Standard costs can be flagged to be included in the costs that display on the catalog. However, if an activity is associated with multiple standard costs flagged as included, the total cost will display on the catalog only if the costs are all in the same currency.

The system provides two calculation methods for standard costs:

• Costs based on a flat rate

  Your organization may want to estimate flat rates for such things as meals, hotels, car rental, and so on.

  The amount you specify on a flat-rate cost displays as is on the activity and is multiplied by the number of units for the activity that corresponds to the units of measure that you specify.

  You can change the number of units on activities. On resource activity requests, you can change both the number of units and the amount.

  You can flag a flat-rate standard cost to be included in the catalog. When you add standard costs to an activity, the system displays the sum of all the flagged activity costs in the catalog that is available to managers, mentors, and resources. The learning manager can view the cost details for all costs associated with an activity.

• Activity-specific costs

  Activity specific costs are flat-rate costs for which you specify the amounts directly on the activities that use the cost. Use this standard cost method for costs for which there is no standard rate that would apply across activities.

  For example, if your pedagogical costs are unique to each activity, you will define an activity-based cost for pedagogical costs and specify the cost directly on each activity.

  Note: This is the only cost for which you specify a value directly on the activity. Flat-rate costs cannot be changed on the activity, although you can change the number of units. Resource-base and professional-category base costs have a value of zero on the activity. They are assigned a value when they are associated with a resource by way of a resource activity request.

There can be more than one standard cost per cost type. For example, meals can have separate rates for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Standard costs can be assigned to any activity.