Resold consumption is the easiest revenue to bill wrongly in both directions.
Early accessCubeMSP for cloud & hosting providers
For providers reselling cloud, licences and hosted infrastructure: consumption that moves monthly, licence counts that drift, and margin that needs watching.
- Cloud & hosting
- UK hosted on AWS, set up online
- 01234 672 617
Reselling cloud infrastructure and licences puts a provider in an unusual commercial position: the cost base changes every month without anybody deciding it should. Licence counts drift as clients hire and leave, consumption rises with a project nobody told you about, and vendor pricing moves on the vendor’s schedule rather than yours. The providers who do well at it are the ones who reconcile properly and reconcile often. CubeMSP holds quantities, costs and sell prices per client service with a dated history, so drift is visible in both directions before it turns into a credit note or a quiet loss.
- Both ways
Reconciliation finds under-billing too
- Dated
Quantity history, not overwritten values
- Per client
Margin, rather than a reassuring total
What goes wrong
The recurring problems in cloud & hosting
Not every business has all five. Almost every business we speak to has three.
Licence counts that drift
Clients hire and leave without telling you. A count set at onboarding and never reconciled is wrong within six months, and it is wrong in whichever direction costs you credibility.
Consumption that arrives as a surprise
A client’s project raises infrastructure spend substantially. You find out when the vendor invoice arrives, which is after the month you should have discussed it.
Margin measured in aggregate
Total resale revenue against total vendor cost tells you the book is profitable. It does not tell you which clients are subsidising which, and the answer is rarely what people expect.
Vendor price changes applied late
A licence cost rises on the vendor’s schedule. Applying it to sixty clients means finding sixty agreements, which is why it usually gets applied to the largest ten and forgotten.
Migrations that overrun quietly
Cloud migrations are quoted from experience and delivered alongside the day job. Without time recorded against the project, the ones that lost money look exactly like the ones that did not.
What we do about it
How CubeMSP is set up for cloud & hosting
Configuration, not a separate edition. Everything here is in the same product - it is switched on and shaped when you set up.
Quantities with a dated history
Licence and capacity counts held with effective dates, so a change mid-term is recorded rather than overwriting what was true last month.
Reconciliation in both directions
What you bill against what you were billed, per client and per service. Under-billing is found as reliably as over-billing, which is the half most providers never look for.
Margin per client, not per book
Cost and sell on every line means profitability is visible per client and per service rather than as a single reassuring total.
Vendor changes applied at scale
A cost change reviewed against every affected client line in one operation, with the clients falling below your margin threshold flagged before you decide what to do.
Migrations tracked properly
Project boards with time booked against tasks, so the difference between the quoted migration and the delivered one informs the next quote.
Reviews that justify the spend
Client reviews setting out what was consumed, what it cost and what changed - the conversation that makes a renewal straightforward.
In practice
Two situations from this sector
Anonymised, but not invented. These are the situations businesses describe before they change anything.
Two years of billing for seven extra mailboxes
The situation
A client had been billed for thirty-eight mailboxes since onboarding. They had thirty-one. The credit was uncomfortable, and the provider was uneasily aware there were probably cases running the other way that had never been found.
What changed
Quantities are reconciled against vendor figures at renewal and on change. Drift is now caught within a billing period, in both directions.
A profitable book with unprofitable clients
The situation
Aggregate resale margin looked healthy. A closer look during a funding round found that four clients on legacy pricing were making a loss, offset by the rest of the base.
What changed
Margin per client and per service is on the dashboard. The four legacy agreements were repriced at renewal on the strength of the figures.
How it happens
Set it up yourself, or with us
Set it up yourself, online
Import your clients, services and ticket history, set up your service catalogue and invite your team. Bring as much ticket history as you can: it is what makes the knowledgebase and similar-incident retrieval useful from day one.
Enterprise
We can do the set-up and migration with you, in person if you’d like, or run CubeMSP in a dedicated environment.
Questions
What this sector asks first
Quantities and costs can be imported through the API, and we build connectors where a documented API exists. We will be specific about which ones we have done rather than implying we have done them all.
Yes, as quantities with effective dates rather than as a metering engine. Consumption figures come in from the vendor platform; CubeMSP holds what was consumed, what it cost and what should be charged.
You import vendor quantities and compare them against what is held per client service. Differences are listed in both directions with the value attached, so the ones worth acting on are obvious.
It produces the billing data and pushes it to your finance system. Raising the invoice stays where your finance process already lives.
They are visible, which is the main thing. Margin per client and per service makes legacy agreements obvious rather than leaving them hidden inside a healthy aggregate.
Where to start
The parts that usually matter most here
Subscription Management Software
Every licence, circuit, backup and contract you resell - with quantity, cost, sell price, term and renewal date, and the margin visible on all of it.
Read moreMSP Software
One system for clients, services, renewals, incidents, projects and reviews - built in the UK by a managed service provider.
Read moreIT Project Management Software
Shared kanban boards for migrations, rollouts and onboardings - with the client invited in, and internal-only tasks filtered on the server.
Read moreClient Reporting Software
Branded quarterly and annual service reviews assembled from the period’s real data - every figure computed, then narrated, never estimated.
Read more
Related
Sectors with similar problems
- Managed Service ProvidersThe core case: recurring support contracts, a shared service desk, project work alongside the day job, and a review meeting every quarter.
- Cyber Security ProvidersFor MSSPs and security consultancies: incident history that stands up to scrutiny, evidence for accreditation, and reviews clients can hand to an auditor.
- Telecoms & Unified Comms ProvidersFor resellers of lines, circuits, SIP and hosted telephony: hundreds of small recurring lines per client, each with its own term and renewal date.
If your process really is unusual
Some requirements are specific to one business rather than one sector. Those get built against the same documented API everybody else uses - not bolted on to the side of a database nobody is allowed to look at.
Cloud & hosting
Show us a real job from your cloud & hosting operation
Bring one order that went wrong and the paperwork that went with it. That tells us more about whether this fits than any list of features.