Handling recurring payments for services - use contracts or assets?
Hi,
I'm in the process of moving all our asset and payment management in to service desk and am currently looking at how to manage recurring costs for services - take an ADSL line for example. I've found two approaches towards doing this, so far.
a) Create a (non-IT) asset to represent the line itself and then create a 'maintenance' contract, whose cost if the monthly rental fee and which lasts for one moth. This then gets renewed each month. The advantage of this is that you can set auto-reminders on the expiring contract, it's pretty easy to do and you only end-up creating one asset to represent the line. Disadvantages are that this doesn't touch the PO system, making a calculation of how much has been spent on this line over a year a bit of a challenge.
b) Create a (non-IT) asset to represent the first month's existence of the line and set the asset to expire in a month. Each month, create a a fresh PO, and receive a 'new' line as a fresh asset. The advantage of this is that all the costs are tracked in the place that you would naturally look for expenditure. Disadvantages are that the process is rather time-consuming, there's no auto alert functionality (although an automatic report could fill this role) and you end up creating large numbers of assets to represent a single entity.
Has anyone else found another way to handle this situation? Am I missing something obvious?
If not, does anyone have experience of having followed one of these paths for a period of time and now wished they hadn't?
I'm in the process of moving all our asset and payment management in to service desk and am currently looking at how to manage recurring costs for services - take an ADSL line for example. I've found two approaches towards doing this, so far.
a) Create a (non-IT) asset to represent the line itself and then create a 'maintenance' contract, whose cost if the monthly rental fee and which lasts for one moth. This then gets renewed each month. The advantage of this is that you can set auto-reminders on the expiring contract, it's pretty easy to do and you only end-up creating one asset to represent the line. Disadvantages are that this doesn't touch the PO system, making a calculation of how much has been spent on this line over a year a bit of a challenge.
b) Create a (non-IT) asset to represent the first month's existence of the line and set the asset to expire in a month. Each month, create a a fresh PO, and receive a 'new' line as a fresh asset. The advantage of this is that all the costs are tracked in the place that you would naturally look for expenditure. Disadvantages are that the process is rather time-consuming, there's no auto alert functionality (although an automatic report could fill this role) and you end up creating large numbers of assets to represent a single entity.
Has anyone else found another way to handle this situation? Am I missing something obvious?
If not, does anyone have experience of having followed one of these paths for a period of time and now wished they hadn't?