Managing the cost of change

The Costing module provides functions required by BMC Helix ITSM: Change Management for the management of cost data. It enables organizations to understand the financial impact of changes or releases on the company's expenses and where the money is going. For example, Change Management uses it to track the various costs associated with change and release requests.

This module allows you to track costs for different tasks and then propagate these costs to the parent change or release record. You can then accumulate the total cost of all the related tasks, services or configuration items (CIs) related to the parent record.

Costs for a change or release can be added by users with Change User permissions, but only users with Cost Manager permissions can configure costing information.

• Adding and modifying costs
• Including autocost estimates in a change request
• Allocating costs to Configuration Items

Costing process workflow

For a change record, the total cost is calculated as the sum of the cost of the change, the cost of all the tasks related to it, and the cost of any CIs related to the change.

On the Change form, select Links > Financials to directly add change related costs. On the Financials dialog box, click Add to add the costs incurred for the change.

The cost rate template and finance rules are used to calculate task related costs. If they are not configured, task-related costs can be added manually. After the task is closed, either the costs that are calculated based on the defined finance rules or the costs that are manually entered are added to the cost of the change.

If the relationship is flagged to be included in the total cost, any CIs or its tasks related to the change request are added into the budget and the actual cost. You must manually specify that CI costs should be included in the total cost of the change within the relationship record.

If there is a CI related to the cost, you can use the Create Allocation option to identify a cost center that will be charged for the work done on the change. Multiple CIs can be related to the cost. In this case, you can use the Create Allocation option to define how the cost of the CIs is distributed among the related CIs.

The total costs related to a change request are calculated after the change request is closed. At the time of closure, a change can involve various costs such as the actual cost of the change itself, the actual cost involved for a task or CI associated to it, cost of a task related to the change, or other criteria. A change cannot be closed unless all the associated tasks are closed. When individual tasks are closed, their costs are automatically reflected in the change cost. To include all related costs in the final actual cost of the change request, the total cost of the change is calculated only after the change is closed.

Select Links > Financials to view the costs related to a change. The total Actual Cost value displays the actual costs per cost types; that is, Labor, Fixed, Other, and Parts. The cost types provided out-of-the-box are only for informational purposes and can be used according to requirements. The Change Financials dialog box displays the total cost based on the cost type for the selected change record.

Limitations of the costing module

These are the current limitations of the costing module.

• The costs calculated for a change are calculated only for a single company and support group. The costs you want to calculate must be for the same company and support group.
• For cost rate templates to be applied, the details defined under Template Categorization must be identical to the information defined for the change or task to which the template is to be applied.

• When calculating the costs of WIP tasks, the effort log for the task must be updated. An effort log can either be added manually or be added by using the Start/Stop clock option on the Assignment tab of the change.

  Important

  Time in WIP will not be calculated without effort logs.

• On the Cost Financials dialog box, when you do not select the cost type, the calculation of the total costs is displayed. After that, you can view details of only a single Cost Type selected from the Show menu and you cannot display the total cost of all the cost types.

  Best practice

  If you have configured multiple cost types, calculations are done only for the first cost type, which is Labor. Therefore, we recommend that you use only the Labor cost type.