4 Different Interpretations of the term ‘Fully Loaded Cost’

What is Fully Loaded Cost?

‘Fully Loaded Cost’ could be interpreted in multiple ways. It depends on the role of an individual and the cost aspect they’re perceiving it from. There are the following 4 interpretations

Finance

All costs that make up a staff cost eg Property, HR, Legal costs. Such cost flow through the corporate waterfall.

IT Functional

The ‘Fully Loaded Cost’ of an IT Functional cost category such as datacentre, databases is made up of all the Staff, Contracts and aspects such as Depreciation.

IT Service

This is made up of Direct and Indirect costs to a Service such as 3rd party Contracts; Staff Timesheets; Infrastructure (eg Servers, Storage, Network); Operational (eg Incidents); and Other financial charges (eg Depreciation)

Business Unit

This constitutes all costs that make up a business unit such as Direct costs (eg Contracts & People) of dedicated systems; plus underpinning Infrastructure costs (eg Data Centre, Servers, Storage, Network) supporting these systems; and indirectly attributable costs (eg Service Mgmt, etc); plus Shared Platform costs (eg Messaging, CRM, etc); and Corporate & Desktop costs (eg Premises, Finance)