Business Units¶
If you need to organize your backups for different parts of your organization, you can add business units underneath your organization in Cloutility.
In the figure above, "Business Unit" has been added under the fictive company "Your Company AB". Adding business units can be done by clicking the Add-button in the top-left corner. Then you can click on the newly added business unit in the left panel to perform operations under this unit.
You may even add business units underneath other business units if you need a deeper hierarchy. Try this out by clicking on Add in the top-left corner to add a new business unit. Set a name for the unit, and optionally an organization number and timezone. Once it has been added, click on it on the left panel. Thereafter, you will be operating in the context of the business unit.
Access Control¶
A reason why one would want to declare a hierarchy of business units in Cloutility is the ability to limit access for units in the organization. You can create new user accounts underneath these units, as well as assign new roles. These users may then access consumption units only within their respective business units.
Click on the cogwheel in the top-right corner, and then on Users. Here you may add new user accounts that are limited only to this particular unit.
Billing & Separation of Consumption¶
If you are dealing with several economic units that do their own accounting separately from each other, you can add Business Units to separate the consumption of backup services between them. Furthermore, a parent business unit can be declared as a reseller of backup services to child business units. A contractual agreement can be established between the parent and its children which allows the parent to specify how the children are charged. This allows Cloutility to calculate billing data that can then be used to generate invoices. It is possible to upload said invoices as PDF files so that the users under the child business unit have access to them via Cloutility.
All of this is manageable from the REST API. There are options to also assign electronic billing codes to subscriptions, allowing you to integrate the billing data from Cloutility with invoicing software.
These codes can be specified from the contract page, at Child Business Unit -> Settings -> Contract. They can also be associated with specific Payment Terms at Parent Business Unit -> Settings -> Payment Terms. A payment term tells us the maximum amount of time that a payment has to be made since the invoice date, for example, 30 days.