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Billing Process for Harvard University

Direct Billing for NERC is a convenience service for Harvard Faculty and Departments. HUIT will pay the monthly invoices and then allocate the monthly usage costs on the Harvard University General Ledger. This follows a similar pattern with how other Public Cloud Providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) accounts are billed and leverage the HUIT Central Billing Portal. Your HUIT Customer Code will be matched to your NERC Project Allocation Name as a Billing Asset. In this process you will be asked for your GL billing code, which you can change as needed per project. Please be cognizant that only a single billing code is allowed per billing asset. Therefore, if you have multiple projects with different funds, if you are able, please create a separate project for each fund. Otherwise, you will need to take care of this with internal journals inside of your department or lab. During each monthly billing cycle, the NERC team will upload the billing Comma-separated values (CSV) files to the HUIT Central Billing system accessible AWS Object Storage (S3) bucket. The HUIT Central Billing system ingests billing data files provided by NERC, maps the usage costs to HUIT Billing customers (and GL Codes) and then includes those amounts in HUIT Monthly Billing of all customers. This is an automated process.

Please follow these two steps to ensure proper billing setup:

  1. Each Harvard PI must have a HUIT billing account linked to their NetID (abc123), and NERC requires a HUIT "Customer Code" for billing purposes. To create a HUIT billing account, sign up here with your HarvardKey. The PI's submission of the corresponding HUIT "Customer Code" is now seamlessly integrated into the PI user account role submission process. This means that PIs can provide the corresponding HUIT "Customer Code" either while submitting NERC's PI Request Form or by submitting a new ticket at NERC's Support Ticketing System under the "NERC PI Account Request" option in the Help Topic dropdown menu.

    What if you already have an existing Customer Code?

    Please note that if you already have an existing active NERC account, you need to provide your HUIT Customer Code to NERC. If you think your department may already have a HUIT account but you don't know the corresponding Customer Code then you can contact HUIT Billing to get the required Customer Code.

  2. During the Resource Allocation review and approval process, we will utilize the HUIT "Customer Code" provided by the PI in step #1 to align it with the approved allocation. Before confirming the mapping of the Customer Code to the Resource Allocation, we will send an email to the PI to confirm its accuracy and then approve the requested allocation. Subsequently, after the allocation is approved, we will request the PI to initiate a change request to input the correct "Customer Code" into the allocation's "Institution-Specific Code" attribute's value.

    Very Important Note

    We recommend keeping your "Institution-Specific Code" updated at all times, ensuring it accurately reflects your current and valid Customer Code. The PI or project manager(s) have the authority to request changes for updating the "Institution-Specific Code" attribute for each resource allocation. They can do so by submitting a Change Request as outlined here.

    How to view Project Name, Project ID & Institution-Specific Code?

    By clicking on the Allocation detail page through ColdFront, you can access information about the allocation of each resource, including OpenStack and OpenShift as described here. You can review and verify Allocated Project Name, Allocated Project ID and Institution-Specific Code attributes, which are located under the "Allocation Attributes" section on the detail page as described here.

    Once we confirm the six-digit HUIT Customer Code for the PI and the correct resource allocation, the NERC admin team will initiate the creation of a new ServiceNow ticket. This will be done by reaching out to HUIT Billing or directly emailing HUIT Billing at huit-billing@harvard.edu for the approved and active allocation request.

    In this email, the NERC admin needs to specify the Allocated Project ID, Allocated Project Name, Customer Code, and PI's Email address. Then, the HUIT billing team will generate a unique Asset ID to be utilized by the Customer's HUIT billing portal.

    Important Information regarding HUIT Billing SLA

    Please note that we will require the PI or Manager(s) to repeat step #2 for any new resource allocation(s) as well as renewed allocation(s). Additionally, the HUIT Billing SLA for new Cloud Billing assets is 2 business days, although most requests are typically completed within 8 hours.

    Harvard University Security Policy Information

    Please note that all assets deployed to your NERC project must be compliant with University Security policies as described here. Please familiarize yourself with the Harvard University Information Security Policy and your role in securing data. If you have any questions about how Security should be implemented in the Cloud, please contact your school security officer: "Havard Security Officer".