Booking Units
General concept
Booking units (sometimes abbreviated as BEH [Buchungseinheiten]) are a standardized accounting and allocation mechanism used in shared-service environments, particularly in information technology (IT), cloud computing, and other resource-based services. They provide a common quantitative measure for planning, consuming, and charging for services whose underlying costs are heterogeneous or variable. Booking units are not a physical resource themselves; rather, they represent an abstracted unit of consumption that aggregates multiple cost drivers into a single, comparable metric.
Purpose and role
The primary role of booking units is to simplify the management and allocation of shared resources. In complex service environments, actual costs are typically influenced by multiple factors, such as infrastructure investment, energy consumption, personnel effort, maintenance, and software licensing. Booking units translate these diverse inputs into a uniform measure that can be used for:
- allocating capacity among multiple users or institutions,
- tracking and comparing service consumption over time,
- enabling internal charging, cost recovery, or cost-neutral settlement models,
- supporting planning, budgeting, and governance processes.
By decoupling service usage from individual technical parameters, booking units allow users to focus on consumption at a service level rather than on detailed cost structures.