Actual Costs

Actual Costs are the costs actually incurred in an accounting period, as opposed to planned values such as budget or standard costs and expected values such as the forecast. They result from the business transactions posted in financial accounting.

In IT cost management, actual costs form the basis for plan-actual comparison, for assessing forecast accuracy and for cause-based distribution to services and recipients. Clean period accruals are important: invoices must be assigned to the period in which the service was provided, otherwise payment dates distort the picture. Deviations between plan and actual are analyzed in the Plan-vs-Actual Variance.

Actual costs must be distinguished from normal and standard costs, which work with smoothed or imputed rates. For reliable internal charging, the following applies: the more complete and timely actual costs are available, the more reliable service costs, rates and charges will be.