How to use the Regulatory burden measure  |  Guidance notes

Set up compliance cost form

In the 'Set up compliance cost constraints section', you set the parameters or assumptions of your costings. This means deciding on the segments you need to cost; whether your ongoing costs will always be the same from year to year or will change each year; and whether you want to cost by size of business (small, medium, large, community organisation) or level of government (state and local).

What you choose here affects the rest of your proposal – how you calculate your compliance cost.

1. Click the 'Set up compliance cost constraints' link (with the arrow next to it). The default settings will appear but you can easily change them.
2. Choose the segments that need costing for your proposal and click apply.
3. For each segment you need, choose whether it will have a constant or variable ongoing cost.
4. If you’ve chosen 'Variable', choose the number of years you're costing. If you’ve chosen 'constant', the number of years you're costing will default to "1".
5. If you're costing for the business segment, choose whether you'll be costing by business size (small, medium, large or community organisation) or not.
6. If you're costing for the government segment, choose whether you'll be costing by level of government (state or local) or not.
7. Click the Save constraints button.
8. Now, move on to calculating your costs.

Important! If your proposal already contains tasks and activities, changing these settings will affect those items. For example, if you remove a segment, all information that exists for the segment will be removed. If you add a segment, you'll need to add tasks and activities for that segment before the proposal is considered complete.

Important! The constraints you choose will affect how you calculate your compliance costs. You cannot change the constraints at either the option or activity costing level. Instead, you need to return to the actual section containing this information and make your changes.

Now, move onto calculating your costs.