Skip to content

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). NERC must have HUIT “Customer Code” for billing purposes. To create a HUIT billing account, sign up here with your HarvardKey. This is already now part of PI user account role submission process that means PI can provide corresponding HUIT “Customer Code” while submitting NERC's PI Request Form or by submitting a new ticket at the NERC's Support Ticketing System (osTicket) under "NERC PI Account Request" option on Help Topic dropdown list.

    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 Resource Allocation review and approval process, we will use the HUIT "Customer Code" provided by the PI during step #1 to map to each approved allocations. Before mapping this Customer Code to Resource Allocation, we will send out an email to confirm with the PI or Manager(s). Additionally, there is an option for you to provide a new 33-digit GL Code if you wish to override your default GL code, which may differ from the default GL code previously associated with the Customer Code.

    How to view the Allocated Project Name and Allocated Project ID?

    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 will need to provide us Allocated Project Name and Allocated Project ID 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 correct resource allocation, the NERC admin team will create a new ServiceNow ticket by contacting HUIT Billing or by emailing HUIT Billing directly at huit-billing@harvard.edu for all approved and active allocation requests. In this email, NERC admin needs to specify the Customer Code and Unique Project Allocation Name. This will be mapped to a unique Asset ID in the HUIT billing portal.

    Important Information regarding HUIT Billing SLA

    Please Note, we will need PI or Manger(s) to repeat step #2 for any new resource allocation(s) as well as renewed allocation(s). Also, HUIT Billing SLA for new Cloud Billing asset 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".