CA Clarity™ IT Financial Manager

Centralize, Simplify, and Extend IT Service Financial Management

Today, IT finance uses multiple systems to track costs associated with all IT work. As a result, IT struggles to centrally collect the service costs, and relate the aggregated amounts to each customer in a timely, accurate, and efficient manner.  Meanwhile, managing to budget and accurately tracking and billing the business for services and strategic initiatives has become a critical component of IT management.

CA Clarity offers a single IT finance system of record that maps IT costs to services consumed, dynamically analyzes the impact due to budget changes, provides a detailed invoice for IT services, and provides an audit mechanism for  all IT cost changes.  For improved ongoing IT service planning, IT Financial Manager also offers capabilities to track and monitor total cost of ownership (TCO), and report all costs and charges through recovery statements. 

Comprehensive Budgeting and Forecasting

IT Financial Manager allows comprehensive financial planning for all IT investments, whether they are related to individual services, shared services, projects or assets. The capability is realized by using the hierarchy of investments involved in providing the service – including assets, projects and applications – and as a result, it enables granular total cost and effort tracking and measurement of providing each service in support of bottoms-up budgeting and forecasting, as well as total cost drill-down analysis at the IT portfolio level.  In support of ‘what-if’ analysis, IT Financial Manager also allows users to create multiple financial plan scenarios, and connect them to portfolio scenarios.

Chargebacks for Increased Cost Visibility

The chargeback capabilities in IT Financial Manager enable organizations to issue chargebacks for IT service costs to specific business units who subscribe to the respective service. This capability provides the visibility to all relevant stakeholders regarding what it actually costs to deliver IT services to the business, thereby creating a stronger partnership between IT and the business in optimizing future IT expenditures. The chargebacks are presented to business units with a unified and detailed invoice for all work performed by IT, and includes a comprehensive breakdown of all project/service costs, including both labor and non-labor costs. Furthermore, CA Clarity also offers the ability to leverage previously collected costs to project the total lifecycle cost of a service, thereby increasing visibility to long-term service cost-of-delivery. 

Invoicing and Cost Recovery Statements for Business and IT Financial Management and Review

IT Financial Manager allows IT to provide a single invoice to the business which details all services delivered by IT. Department representatives can view a list of their invoices and drill down to see the detailed invoice itself, including a pro-forma version of the current period invoice. The invoice is presented in aggregate by service or other top-level investment, and business users can drill down to view the detailed charges for a given investment. The business users can also view a page showing all the detailed chargeback transactions that relate to specific service costs listed on the invoice.  Department representatives can approve or reject invoices. If changes to the invoice are required, IT can process reversal and adjustments of charges.

 

Contrast incurred costs with charged-back costs for services delivered.

IT team members also benefit through the improved analysis and review capabilities. IT Financial Manager provides detailed cost recovery statements for all IT services delivered to the business. The recovery statements compare the incurred costs with those that have been charged back (billed) to the business and may be generated for all IT expenditures, by IT departments, and by IT service. The ability to compare cost and associated chargebacks enables IT leaders to gain insight into ROI costs per service, and therefore plan future service provisioning more effectively.  This also ensures that the business obtains better visibility into the value provided by IT, and the true costs of delivering various services to their organization.