Chargebacks for engineering software are crucial but take so much time. What if there is an easier way? Engineering teams are consistently asked to align with business objectives through ensuring costs and charges are billed back appropriately by manager, project, or department.
Would you like to have an easy way of seeing how your engineering teams are spending their time and which expensive software they are using?
Managers need to consider the best ways to make decisions about:
- Cost allocations and overall Engineering expenditure
- Intelligent use of engineering resources
- Spending restrictions
- Resource distribution
Here are some challenges managers in different roles face with chargebacks:
- Are engineering software costs escalating every year?
- What are the current and future staffing and project costs?
- Is there increasingly less transparency about how costs are calculated?
- Would it be helpful to see regular/monthly running totals of costs to ensure they are tracking to budget?
- What is the best way to ensure all groups have the licenses they need (for individual users or groups)?
- Is there a more efficient way to avoid wasting too much time calculating costs for licenses? (Hint: LAMUM can help you here).
- What are the considerations if staff leave or there are new starters? How do you pro-rate the costs?
- Are there different types of users – depending on how frequently they use engineering software?
- How to create “unbiased“ reports?
To achieve an efficient engineering chargeback process, accurate software usage metering is crucial. We have discussed in our blog before about how different reports help managers make educated decisions.
How can easier to use chargeback reports help you?
Accurate, unbiased chargeback reports help you to:
- Create cost allocation system and improve cost-awareness
- Discover opportunities for optimization
- Enhance business productivity
- Enterprise-wide accurate license usage reports
- Identify the true active usage
- Internal billing based on actual use
- Optimize resource planning and efficiency
- Simplify audits
- Track and recover unused software licenses (See our recent blog)
How can LAMUM reports help us?
We have developed the LAM (License Asset Manager) side of our business for a long time. LAM can help you track the information you need including cost of licenses. We are proud to over the years have developed a one-stop-shop solution to managing licenses, software asset tracking and usage reporting all in one place. Our tool is very comprehensive.
Did you know that you can see automatically a chargeback percentage? Our reports highlight comprehensive information for every feature and license file that is tracked, allowing for a completely granular IT chargeback process.
All of the reporting data from LAMUM can be exported to Excel at the click of a button or via a batch report (email or folder-based). See an example of a chargeback report for NX here.