Appropriate cost reporting: an indispensable link to accountability

As a response to the call for accountability, social work administrators have turned to the use of tools which measure input and output developed for business administration, e.g., cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis. Social work administrators have primarily been concerned with the difficulty of measuring social work outputs and neglected the difficulty of measuring costs. In order to promote a better understanding of costs and their complexity, the author describes five cost reporting approaches utilizing actual cost data. The results suggest that the choice of approach has a definite effect on the cost outcome. Therefore, in order to promote accountability, social work administrators must make every effort to understand and be involved in the measurement of costs as well as outputs.