Financial Management

[thechosenone69]

The ABC of Finance:

Accounting (MAN)
Budgeting (MAN)
Charging(OPT)

Can someone shed some light to this with an example, why is charging considered optional? I think it should be Mandatory for a business, unless I misunderstood the meaning the entire time.

Thank you in advance for your reply.

[mnsmith]

Chosen One

You are correct in thinking that it in business it should be mandatory to charge but you have to remember that ITIL is not just used in the business sector. I work in the public sector, where most of the time we don't charge each other to use the IT services we provide, but we still have to account and budget for our costs.

I hope that clarifies things

Mick
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Mick Smith
Change, Configuration and Release Manager

[rpmason]

Chosen, remember ITIL is geared toward internal IT organizations that provide support to the business. You can choose to charge for services and there are various reasons why and why not (the familiar It Depends).

IT might be simply a cost center for the business and you don’t charge any department for anything. IT might be a non-profit center where you need to at least break even with minimal charging for every service. IT might even be an internal profit center (but unlikely).

You can use charging to sway behavior--such as cheaper throughput at night to encourage the business to do certain things when usage is low, such as backups--or even charge for each Service Desk call.
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Ruth Mason
USA

[ozz]

In a smaller environment, it may not be practical, also in service provider scenarios it can become very complicated as OLA's and SLA's get blurry and fast. Some corps have fixed budgets, so you can charge back the world but get nothing in return..
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Ozzie Sutcliffe

NYC

[thechosenone69]

Thanks you for the clarification & for the examples.

Regards,

a

[Timo]

In some environment the first too are also optional

[vimprash]

Agree. ITIL is set of best practices and may be OGC would have thought charging is already in best way all over the world