We often have Application and Service Owners that want to directly allocate specific costs to specified Applications and Services.  For example, certain people may support a specific application, costs for a vendor will be directly related to an application.  Cost Centers may solely support a particular application, service, or group of services.

They also want direct costs to be shown in the Application and Service Reports as shown in the attachment Application Direct Costs.

I am wondering if anyone else has done this and if so how.  Attached is a Direct Cost Model Example.  Let me know if you know of a better way to do this without substantially impacting performance.

Thank you,

Michelle McGuire

We have a column for Application Name in the same vendor mapping file that is used to map vendor cost to towers. That same data is used to map cost from towers to applications. If I wanted to, I could probably add an application column to the cost center mapping table as well. We don't have a separate allocation. It just flows through the model to Applications the normal way. Does that make sense? I like the idea of the reports showing what is a direct cost vs what is spread.

We do this all the time, @Michelle McGuire. Often times we tag line items as low as in Cost Source. We do not do that with CCs, but the concept is the same.

Our Finance organization had the concept of "Resource Pools", that grouped those tags. Typical examples: server models/manufacturer and, more significantly, the various Cloud providers. After a Finance tool reorganization they migrated to a slightly different structure, but it works in the same way.