Cost Management

Expense lines can be aggregated to apply all configuration item expenses to a parent business service or application with relationship paths.

Expenses can also be allocated to a business entity that is responsible for the expense.

Budgets are related to additional records, displayed as related lists on its form.

Understand what budgets and cost centers are and how to manage them in the Cost Management application.

The most common business entity to associate financial information is the cost center.

CI rate card costs generate expense lines for configuration items on the associated rate card

A configuration item (CI) rate card is a group of recurring configuration item costs associated with multiple configuration items. Rate cards make it easier to enter and track costs that are the same across multiple configuration items.

Cost centers are related to additional records, displayed as related lists on its form.

The demo data available with Cost Management provides samples of the data types to illustrate its use.

There are a several ways to generate expense lines for objects in the system.

Define a new cost center or update the details of the existing cost centers.

In Cost Management, task rate cards and labor rate cards capture operating costs by generating expense lines representing the cost of performing a task

Manage the relationships between business services and their expenses with allocation units and cost centers.

Domain separation is unsupported in Cost Management. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

The ServiceNow Cost Management application tracks configuration item costs. The costs can be allocated to business units and used in reports.

Only certain roles can customize Cost Overview modules. In addition to viewing, roles with access can refresh, add, delete, and rearrange reports.

For every expense line generated for a business service, the default allocation rule Process Svc-CC Relationships will attempt to process the expense and create allocations for each cost center that is consuming the service.

Define distribution rules to view distribution costs that are distributed according to the rules.

Several components are installed with the Cost Management application.

The business rule Process Task Rate Cards runs when tasks close and checks to see if any task rate cards apply. If they do, an expense line is created according to the rate card.

Distribution Costs are costs which can be divided among a group of records.

The rate type functionality is used to categorize different types of work. For example, Standard versus Overtime.

Activate the Cost Management plugin (com.snc.cost_management) using the admin role.

If you're adding a condition to a CI rate card, use the Update CI List related link to create the relationship between the configuration item or items and the rate card.

To get reports that represent the total costs for a business service, there must be some association between the service and the CIs that make up the service. This is done with CI relationships.

You can add a CI rate card that specifies an hourly rate and associate a rate code.

Cost centers are a commonly used reference between financial systems and IT. Cost center records represent business entities, and have a related list of CI Cost Center Relationships that measure the cost center's consumption of business services.

Allocation unit records define the capacity and usage of a business service.

The Process Last Month CI Costs scheduled job processes costs of configuration items. To start aggregating expenses to parents, identify the relationships to use for aggregation. Because there are many options for CMDB relationships, using all available paths for aggregation is generally not efficient.

Cost management provides budgets for you to plan expenses for a certain time period.

You create cost centers and associate budgets and expense allocations with them.

The labor rate card associates a rate code with a labor rate.

Task rate cards are rate cards associated with records in a task table.