Finance

Looking to bill for file service use?

Billing for use of the file service can be both a valuable incentive to improve efficiency and a business critical function in a shared services or service delivery model.

The driving forces behind the implementation of a system of internal billing or cost reporting (showback) vary according to the business model in place. An IT service provider or public cloud provider wishes to accurately bill its customers for service use and to continuously add value to that service. Organizations using a shared-services model may wish to simply recover the costs of service provision. Other organizations look to internal billing as a method of encouraging efficient use of the file service.

Northern’s Solution

Northern’s File Service Cost Distribution solution area offers a workflow that has limited dependency on IT resources, uses defensible metrics that accurately reflect service use and includes the ability for customers to review the foundation for their charges in a self-service portal.

Benefits

The ability to rigorously and repeatedly calculate service use by customer, department or business unit and automatically feed usage metrics into an invoicing system enables the finance department to establish an efficient and accurate billing or showback system for file service use.

In a shared services model, costs for service provision and continuous development can be recovered efficiently, fairly and automatically.

For organizations delivering file services to external customers, offering the ability to match invoices with service usage information increases transparency and adds value to the overall service.

Internal billing or showback offers a powerful incentive for the wider organization to treat file storage as a valuable service that should be used carefully and efficiently, reducing overall capital and operating costs for the organization.

In an organization subscribed to an external billing service, having the ability to review file service use offers a method of confirming billing accuracy. It also enables the wider organization to improve how the service is being used and reduce future costs.