Financial standards and guidelines

The Guidelines provide information on how Districts and the previous DHBs have applied the Costing Standards in relation to schedule seven Intermediate Products, ie, the goods and services costed and allocated to patient events.

The Costing Guidelines have been created to achieve the following objectives:

• Assist Districts to implement an event level costing system
• Enable assessment of Districts costing methodology in comparison to other Districts
• Assist the interpretation of event level costing data
• Improve the development of the Costing Standards

Current edition – version 11

Version 11 was issued in July 2019.

• Common Costing Guidelines (DOCX 355KB)

The Costing Standards have been developed for used in the public health sector to provide standards for the costing of District (previously known as DHBs) services.

Last updated 26 October 2023.

The main purposes of the Costing Standards are to:

1. Ensure consistency in activity based costing and cost allocation within Te Whatu Ora
2. Improve the quality of cost reporting
3. Improve operational decision-making
4. Provide better data for benchmarking

Current Edition - version 24

Version 24 is effective from 1 July 2023 and replaces the previous Version 23. 

• Costing Standards Version 24 (DOCX 954KB)

Changes made from version 23 are highlighted on the Change Schedule on Page 4.

The Common Costing Group Terms of Reference explain how the purpose of the group, how it operates, its membership, meeting details and highlights the linkages to other relevant groups across the sector

• Common Costing Group Terms of Reference (DOCX 31KB) 

This document sets out the FTE (Full-time Equivalent) counting framework for planning and reporting purposes from 2006:

• Measuring Staff Resources (DOC 388KB)