“With ServiceFlow we charge back services based on consumption and give business units control to drive more value from services.”
– Lincoln Little, Director of
Global BU Billing, Cummins Inc.

IT Chargeback

Many outsourcing providers of IT and business services estimate that they undercharge their customers approximately 3% to 5% of services actually delivered. On the other hand, customers are often not confident that the invoices they receive are accurate. The main reason for both of these situations is limited capabilities for administering service agreements and tracking service usage data.

ServiceFlow™ Service Financial Management software provides the capabilities to deliver detailed, accurate billing based on specific business transactions, consumption, and other relevant transaction/event data—enabling automatic application of your cost allocation methods for each customer. Invoicing and relevant chargeback reports are easy to validate based on contractual price formulas and detailed usage data.

ServiceFlow also automates tasks related to service agreement administration—including collecting service usage data from business applications and monitoring tools, billing for services, invoice distribution and presentation, and the ability to export into an organization's financial system such as Oracle Financials or SAP. Following are more details around the essential capabilities provided by ServiceFlow Service Financial Management (SFM) software.

Billing, Invoice Validation and Dispute Resolution. ServiceFlow collects cost and service data from a variety of business applications and correlates it with services, business units, individuals, and geographies to provide accurate service billing and chargeback capabilities based on automated calculations of service pricing and actual service usage data. ServiceFlow also enables customers to validate invoices by reviewing all the cost elements composing the overall invoice, providing confidence in the accuracy of service costs. Customer concerns regarding invoice accuracy are resolved through an automated dispute resolution workflow—enabling vendor managers from the customer side and account managers from the service provider side to exchange information until an agreement is reached and is concluded by invoice approval.

Allocating Service Invoices by Business Units and Regions. ServiceFlow integrates with an organization's human resources systems in order to map individual employees to appropriate business units, regions, and services. As a result, organizations can pursue usage-based cost allocation approaches in which the business units are charged only for services that they actually use.

Service Chargebacks. ServiceFlow delivers an extensive set of capabilities that enable a chargeback mode of operation for services delivered internally within the company as well as for outsourced services. This model enables service consuming organizations to be more accountable for their service spending and, by doing so, reduces unjustified use of services.

Approving Monthly Chargeback Statements. ServiceFlow eliminates the primary reason for these disputes—lack of a reliable method for tracking service usage, computing costs, and allocating costs—by delivering these capabilities and allowing business unit managers to review and approve detailed, consistent, accurate monthly statements which eliminates the majority of concerns and disputes. ServiceFlow also offers automated chargeback statement approval and dispute resolution processes, helping to ensure cost allocation errors are revealed and resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible.