Introduction
Ever diminishing university funding by the government urges university library management to provide better library services at a continuously lower cost. To cope with these cost pressures, library management needs to improve its understanding of the relevant cost drivers.
To date, most studies on university library costs have relied on traditional activity-based costing (ABC) systems.Although these studies found ABC both providing library management with a more detailed cost analysis of activities and services, and assisting management in understanding what actually causes certain costs ABC also appeared to cause two significant problems. First, setting up an ABC system can be very costly, especially if the current accounting system does not support the collection of ABC information. Second, the system needs to be regularly updated, which further increases its cost. These limitations motivated Kaplan and Anderson6 to develop time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC), a revised version of ABC, solving these problems, without losing the benefits. The most important characteristic of this technique is its simplicity, as only two kinds of parameters need to be estimated: the number of time units (e.g. minutes) consumed by the activities related to the cost objects and the cost per time unit. Hence, TDABC systems cannot only be implemented quicker (and thus cheaper), but also updated easier, than traditional ABC systems