Enterprise accounting and Financial Planning & Analysis systems are corporate financial tools that limit financial transparency to the G/L and departmental layers of the business. These traditional systems fail to provide the level of insight needed to identify cost savings, measure the ROI of IT initiatives, and pinpoint the factors driving the consumption and increasing demand for IT resources. The impacted areas include labour, hardware, software, data centre facilities and vendor spend. ERP-systems also fail to display a TCO of service or demand for service.

ERP-systems are not properly aligned with IT infrastructure components that drive technology spend at the project, application and business services level. They also do not provide enough granularity to develop actionable insights needed to optimise spend and create financial transparency. Any efforts to repurpose these tools for IT financial planning will most likely be costly, time-consuming and resource-intensive.

ERP-systems are designed for transactional reporting at the Cost Centre level and are not correlated to IT operational data from ITSM tools, Application Portfolio Management systems or Public Cloud Invoices. This limitation makes it impossible to create the view of IT spend that the business needs to align strategic initiatives with technology resources.²

BI Tools are not configured for IT Financial reporting and analytics. In many cases, BI tools still rely on spreadsheets for data inputs which limit the ability to automate.

ClearCost integrates data from your current corporate financial systems such as Oracle, SAP, Technology One and NetSuite, for that essential ‘source of truth’ to financial data for extension into the world of Service Financials. ClearCost’s robust IT cost modeling architecture categorises disparate data and aligns it to the applications and services consumed by the business.

This transformation creates a single source of truth that enables IT leadership to optimise costs, improve financial agility, drive innovation and confidently ensure that IT spend is aligned with the strategic initiatives. Without this, the lack of visibility will most likely result in missed cost savings opportunities which can impact your business tremendously.

Many of the solutions offered through traditional ERP system providers use simplistic cost models that limit the level of granularity and potential insights. In contrast, the unique nature of IT service cost modelling ties together capacity, demand, and resourcing to the core Enterprise systems, providing the only truly integrated approach to support IT financial analysis.

ClearCost is such a system, providing proprietary benefits which include a customised, client-focused industry-based taxonomy used to categorise IT costs from different source systems, an integrated application suite tailored to IT-specific metrics & financial reporting, advanced analytics, and a data-driven allocation model demonstrating the linkage between business demand and IT.

Relying on a single financial view of IT hinders your ability to optimise IT spend. ClearCost’s five dimensional perspective of technology spend provides a crystal clear view of how IT resources are being consumed.

Modern enterprise-wide financial systems limit your ability to effectively manage spend by forcing your IT organisation to rely on cost centre focused reporting to make complex and impactful decisions that affect profitability, operational performance and innovation. By leveraging the transparency created by ClearCost’s 5 Views of IT Finance you can pin-point which levers to pull in order to effectively optimise your IT expenditures and align technology resources with the business outcomes prioritised within your organisation. With ClearCost you will be able to easily identify the IT resource components driving the cost of internal IT services, business services, applications, and projects while using those insights to confidently plan for ongoing operations and strategic initiatives. Our solution is tailored to meet the specific needs of each individual enterprise and enables you to benchmark against industry peers.

Each moment that passes represents missed opportunity and increased exposure.

Automate your IT FP&A process and spend more time focusing on optimising operations and creating value by eliminating manual spreadsheets and lengthy budgeting cycles. Leverage the power and confidence of having one true source for IT financial data, reporting and analytics.

Accelerate business performance by demonstrating fiscal responsibility through proactively shifting spend from run to change and/or transform. Track all cost drivers and performance metrics within IT, calculate a total cost for IT service, and reduce costs through deeper analysis of cost drivers.

Optimise your total IT spend by defending capital and operational expenditures by business unit,demand drivers and business applications. Gain a comprehensive catalogue of IT services, infrastructure and licenses segmented by capacity, demand and activity units.

Eliminate uncertainty by having a clear understanding of how resource consumption impacts the P&L. Shape demand for IT services by developing cost models for defensible showback, chargeback or Bill of IT. Reduce overspend and wasted capital by promoting financial accountability within your organisation.

Promote business innovation through scenario modelling and cost benchmarking your capacity technology along ‘utility’ computing lines for streamlined pricing, capacity allocation, lifecycle management and forecasting support.