Determining Media Chargebacks
The
Billing and Chargeback Summary report provides a line item of each client’s tape consumption. The Billing Summary Report calculates the chargeback based on billing and usage policies as outlined in
Creating a Billing and Chargeback Policy.
The report displays data based on the hosts/servers. This procedure assumes that you know which business units own specific hosts/servers.
There are a couple of limitations to the billing and chargeback reports:
• The report does not consider shared tape usage. If Client A wrote to tapes 1, 2 and 3, the report shows charges for the client for those three tapes. If Client B also wrote to tapes 1 and 2, the report lists charges for that client for those two tapes. Therefore, if both Client A and Client B belong to the same business unit, they are billed twice for two of the three tapes.
• The report always uses the current cost of a tape. If the cost changes and you generate a new report, the report reflects the new cost. However, if you run an old report from a year ago, it would also pick up the new cost and therefore not be the same as the original report. Therefore, before you change the unit cost, generate and export previous reports for comparison.
To determine chargebacks for a business unit or customer
Each client server row contains subtotals for GB and tape consumption.
2. To limit the data to a single business unit or department, modify the scope of the Billing and Chargeback Summary report.
3. Check the value in the Total Cost field, which is displayed at the right of the table. This value is the total charge to the business unit or customer.
4. If you want to itemize your chargebacks for your business unit/customer, consider the individual costs that comprise the total.
If you feel that the chargebacks are not accurate, do the following:
• Ensure that the host group does not contain clients that belong to another business unit or customer.