# Cloud & Hosting Providers

> For providers reselling cloud, licences and hosted infrastructure: consumption that moves monthly, licence counts that drift, and margin that needs watching.

**URL:** https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/cloud-and-hosting-providers

Resold consumption is the easiest revenue to bill wrongly in both directions.

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.

## Figures

- **Both ways** Reconciliation finds under-billing too
- **Dated** Quantity history, not overwritten values
- **Per client** Margin, rather than a reassuring total

## Common problems in this sector

- **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 CubeMSP does about it

- **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.

## Use cases

### Two years of billing for seven extra mailboxes

**Scenario:** 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.
**Outcome:** 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

**Scenario:** 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.
**Outcome:** Margin per client and per service is on the dashboard. The four legacy agreements were repriced at renewal on the strength of the figures.

## Implementation

1. **Discovery:** A structured session mapping how you run now - the PSA you have outgrown, the spreadsheet of renewals, the shared mailbox that is really your ticket queue, and the review deck somebody rebuilds by hand every six months. We come back with what the platform covers as standard and what needs building.
2. **Configuration:** Your service catalogue, ticket taxonomy, boards, roles, approval limits and review templates set up to match how you actually work - not a demo tenant with your logo dropped on it. Your categories, not ours.
3. **Data migration:** Clients, contacts, sites, services, renewal dates and enough ticket history to make the knowledgebase and similar-incident retrieval useful on day one. An empty AI is a useless AI, so the history matters more here than in most migrations.
4. **Training & rollout:** Role-based training - the service desk learns logging and resolution, account managers learn reviews and renewals, directors learn the reporting. We usually pilot with one technician and one client before opening it up.
5. **Ongoing support:** UK support from the people who built the platform and use it themselves, with a named contact, agreed response times, and a roadmap you can influence. Being a small vendor is an advantage here and we intend to keep it.

## Frequently asked questions

**Does it connect to vendor and distributor portals?**

Quantities and costs can be imported through the API, and we build connectors during implementation where a documented API exists. We will be specific about which ones we have done rather than implying we have done them all.

**Can it handle usage-based services?**

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.

**How does reconciliation work in practice?**

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.

**Does it produce the invoice?**

It produces the billing data and pushes it to your finance system. Raising the invoice stays where your finance process already lives.

**What about clients on legacy pricing?**

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.

## Relevant solution pages

- **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. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/subscription-management-software
- **MSP Software** - One system for clients, services, renewals, incidents, projects and reviews - built in the UK by a managed service provider. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/msp-software
- **IT Project Management Software** - Shared kanban boards for migrations, rollouts and onboardings - with the client invited in, and internal-only tasks filtered on the server. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/it-project-management-software
- **Client Reporting Software** - Branded quarterly and annual service reviews assembled from the period’s real data - every figure computed, then narrated, never estimated. https://cubemsp.co.uk/software/client-reporting-software

## Related industries

- **Managed Service Providers** - The core case: recurring support contracts, a shared service desk, project work alongside the day job, and a review meeting every quarter. https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/managed-service-providers
- **Cyber Security Providers** - For MSSPs and security consultancies: incident history that stands up to scrutiny, evidence for accreditation, and reviews clients can hand to an auditor. https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/cyber-security-providers
- **Telecoms & Unified Comms Providers** - For resellers of lines, circuits, SIP and hosted telephony: hundreds of small recurring lines per client, each with its own term and renewal date. https://cubemsp.co.uk/industries/telecoms-providers

## Contact

- **Product:** CubeMSP
- **Trading name of:** Cube Systems Limited (company number 17220899, ICO registration number ZC216972)
- **Email:** hello@cubemsp.co.uk
- **Sales:** sales@cubemsp.co.uk
- **Support:** support@cubemsp.co.uk
- **Telephone:** 01234 672 617 (+441234672617)
- **Address:** Unit 11, Olney Business Park, Osier Way, Olney, Buckinghamshire, MK46 5FP
- **Opening hours:** Monday to Friday, 9am to 5.30pm
- **Part of:** Crushed Ice Group (https://crushedicegroup.co.uk)