Between April 2007 and March 2008, 19 diverse local authorities from across England took part in the Customer Profiling Project devised by Aston Campbell Associates and the esd-toolkit. 2.7 million service transaction records were successfully matched to customer profiles; these transactions were used to compare service take-up against composite household profiles provided by Experian Ltd. The deliverables included a common infrastructure represented in software for profiling service take-up in local government and a report for each participant which focused on local priorities.

The Customer Profiling Project Summary Report highlights a handful of service transaction take-up patterns. The report focuses on three service areas linked to four public sector national indicators:

• Public Libraries
• Recycling
• Refuse

The report is referenced in a recent HM Government publication entitled Putting the Frontline First: smarter government.

Click here to request a copy of the summary report.

The cost of delivering individual services cannot be compared without a reliable, repeatable and transferable method for costing all the activities involved in the delivery of the service.

Traditional costing methods used in the public sector cannot reliably apportion all the support costs involved in delivering a service. Activity based costing (ABC) is an alternative to the traditional method of deriving costs from accounts. It is used to define processes and allocate direct and indirect costs to the activities that initiated them, thereby determining the true unit costs of products and services. However, many not for profit sector organisations have finance systems that are not geared up to determine transaction costs in this way.

ACA use a ‘top down’ method for analysing the general ledger. The method uses transaction volumes for each service and each access channel the service is delivered through and a method for determining the depth of service delivery being measured. Our work on this was referenced at the Parliament and Internet Conference 2010, Race Online 2012/PWC ‘Champion for Digital Inclusion – the Economic Case for Digital Inclusion’ report.

For more information on transaction costing, click here to send an email to ACA.