Working with Price Items

Pricing in vScope is flexible and allows you to model both direct and shared costs across your IT environment.

All pricing is handled through Price Items, which define how costs are either calculated or split. Price Items are organized in a Price List, which is applied to Billing Accounts through Agreements.

Understanding how Price Items work is key to building your pricing model.

Two ways to work with prices

Price Items are used in two ways:

• Calculate a total cost
• Split a total cost (Chargeback)

Understanding this distinction makes it easier to design your pricing model.

Fixed unit price

Use Fixed unit price when you want to define what something costs, e.g. based on assets such as servers, users, or licenses.

Examples:

• €10 per server CPU
• €5 per user

Filters can be applied to control which assets are included, for example:

• Only running machines
• Only Windows-based systems
• Different price levels depending on size (e.g. small vs large servers)

This is the most common way to build up a total cost per Billing Account.

Split total cost (Chargeback)

Use Split total cost when you already have a cost and want to split it across multiple Billing Accounts.

Instead of calculating cost from assets, Split total cost divides a known total.

Typical use cases:

• Shared infrastructure (backup, network, storage)
• A shared platform or tool subscription
• A fixed overhead cost, for example centralized licenses

Costs can be split in two ways:

• Even split – Split equally across all Billing Accounts.
• Usage-based split – Split proportionally based on usage (e.g. number of user accounts per account)

Examples:

• €120 split across three Billing Accounts using the service.
  • Total Cost per Billing Account = €120/3 = €40
• €500 split based on database size per Billing Account
  • Total Cost per Billing Account = €500 * usage ratio per Billing Account
  • The sum of Total Cost for all Billing Accounts = €500

Combining pricing methods

In many cases, a Price List contains a combination of both approaches:

• Calculate costs using Fixed unit price
• Split shared costs using Split total cost

This allows you to model both:

• Direct costs (tied to assets)
• Indirect costs (shared across multiple accounts)

Split total cost splits a cost across all Billing Accounts that have an Agreement connected to the same Price List.

When to use what

Use Fixed unit price when:

• Costs can be tied to specific assets
• You want transparent, per-unit pricing

Use Split total cost when:

• Costs are shared across multiple Billing Accounts
• The total cost is known and not directly tied to individual assets

Guide: Adding Price Items Learn how to add price items.

Price Groups for packages

For cost-calculating Price Items, you can group prices into packages. This allows you to combine multiple attributes into a single total cost for an asset. You can also add a fixed price and bundle included quantities.

Typical use cases:

• Creating Bronze, Silver, and Gold servers based on disk, RAM, and CPU limits.
• User accounts that include various Microsoft 365 licenses in the price.
• Laptop offerings based on OS, model, and installed applications.

Guide: Creating Price Groups Learn how to create price groups.