It is the end of the month. An IT finance analyst downloads exports from cloud portals, from OpenShift and from the data center records. She merges them in a spreadsheet, assigns rows to customers and projects, and fixes by hand whatever did not match. Three days later the billing data goes out. A week after that, one customer asks why the amount is higher than last time. Answering means reopening the spreadsheet and digging.
Showback and chargeback have a simple purpose: show internal and external customers what IT costs them, and bill them where appropriate. In practice, we often see the monthly close resting on one or two people and a spreadsheet only they understand. When they are ill or leave, the process stops. And every customer question becomes a small investigation.
Why the marathon keeps repeating
The issue is not that people do poor work. It is structural:
- Data arrives in different formats. Every source has its own columns, its own names and often its own currency.
- Customer assignment is manual. Knowing which resource belongs to whom lives in people’s heads or in helper sheets.
- Results are hard to explain. The output shows a total, not how it was reached.
- Every month starts over. The process lives in someone’s routine, not in a system.
That is why the marathon repeats. And it is why “why is this higher than last month?” is so hard to answer.
Make the close an output, not a project
A better approach reverses the order. Instead of assembling costs at month-end, you collect them continuously in a common format and link them to infrastructure whose ownership is already known. The monthly billing data is then simply an output of data that has been in the system all month. Every number has a source, and every change from the previous month can be broken down.
It also helps to keep showback and chargeback distinct. Showback makes costs visible so customers understand what they consume. Chargeback actually bills them. Both need the same data; they differ only in what happens next.
How Eywo Stratum handles it
Eywo Stratum imports costs in the FOCUS standard from cloud providers, OpenShift and the data center, and converts foreign currencies at the Czech National Bank rate. Costs are linked to CMDB items, and because each item belongs to a customer and a project, costs break down by customer and by project without manual assignment.
Pivot tables in the platform support the analysis. When a customer asks a question, you can split the cost by period, platform or item and see exactly what changed.
At month-end the platform produces billing data for showback or chargeback. It comes from the same data you see in the analysis, so what the customer receives matches what can be traced in the system.
In a shared environment with many customers, data separation applies as well. A customer’s users see only their own data, including costs. Customers can review their spend themselves without seeing anything that is not theirs.
Less arguing, more trust
A well-run showback or chargeback process saves time at month-end, but its bigger effect is on the relationship between IT and its customers. Instead of disputing numbers, you can talk about what is being consumed and why. And the analyst who used to spend the first days of every month in spreadsheets gets to go home on time.
Costs by customer and project, pivot tables and monthly billing data are included in the Enterprise edition.
Eywo Stratum Enterprise
For shared-service providers and large organisations.