Retirement cost-benefit reporter

Retiring an application is rarely blocked by engineering. It is blocked by Finance asking for numbers that nobody has assembled in one place. Support contracts still renew. Incidents keep landing in the queue. Licenses sit on the books because reclamation never closed the loop. Each system holds a slice of the picture, but no single artifact ties spend, risk, and recovery into a case someone can sign.

The retirement cost-benefit reporter addresses that gap. A language model reads normalized inputs from IT service management, software asset management, cloud billing, and ERP finance, then produces a structured ROI report for decommission approval. The report is not a forecast dressed up as certainty. It is an evidence ledger: what you pay today, what you stop paying after retirement, and what you recover from licenses and infrastructure you can release.

Application owners know the system is redundant. Platform teams know dependencies are mapped. Security cares that data is wiped and retention policies are enforced. Finance cares about one thing: whether retirement improves the cost position enough to justify the work and the residual risk.

Without a consolidated report, approval meetings devolve into slide decks built by hand the night before. Someone exports a ServiceNow cost allocation. Someone else pulls a Flexera entitlement report. Cloud spend lives in a CSV from AWS Cost Explorer. SAP carries the general ledger line items finance actually recognizes. The numbers rarely align on period, currency, or scope. Approvers either delay the decision or approve on incomplete data, which creates audit exposure later.

The reporter treats retirement as a financial decision with an IT execution plan, not the reverse. It gives approvers a single document where every savings claim traces to a source system and a defined reporting window.

The model combines four cost categories that matter at retirement time.

Ongoing support and run costs. Maintenance fees, vendor support contracts, internal FTE effort attributed to the application, and infrastructure charges that disappear when the workload shuts down. These figures typically originate in ServiceNow financial management or cost allocation modules, AWS billing and tagged resource reports, and SAP cost center postings.

Incident and operational drag. High incident volume on a retiring system is both a risk signal and a cost argument. The reporter summarizes incident counts, mean time to resolve, and recurring problem categories over a stated period from ServiceNow ITSM records. It does not convert every ticket into dollars unless your organization publishes a standard cost-per-incident rate. When that rate exists in finance policy, the model applies it and cites the policy reference.

Stranded license and entitlement spend. Applications scheduled for retirement often leave paid seats, processor licenses, or subscription tiers active until someone proves reclamation. Flexera (or equivalent SAM tooling) supplies entitlement positions, last-known usage, and contract end dates. The reporter lists reclaimable licenses, annualized spend tied to those entitlements, and any penalties or true-up exposure if retirement timing misses a contract boundary.

One-time retirement costs. Decommission work has its own price tag: dependency migration, secure wipe verification, data deletion under retention policy, and project management. The reporter includes these as costs to retire, sourced from project estimates or actuals where available. It does not invent figures. Empty fields stay empty until a human or upstream system supplies a verified number.

Savings are computed as the difference between continuing to run and completing retirement, minus one-time exit costs, over the same period finance uses for capital and operational planning, usually twelve months forward from the proposed retirement date unless your policy specifies otherwise.

Every row in the output report follows the same contract: description, amount, currency, cost source, period, and verification status.

A support line might read: annual vendor maintenance, USD 142,000, SAP general ledger account 6100-APP-legacy, fiscal year 2025, verified. An AWS line might read: EC2 and RDS attributed via cost allocation tag app=claims-portal, USD 38,400, AWS Cost Explorer monthly export, January through June 2025, verified.

When the model cannot tie a figure to an authoritative extract, the amount field is left blank and the verification status reads unverified. The narrative still explains what is missing and which integration or owner must supply it. This is deliberate. Finance approvers have seen too many retirement business cases where rounded estimates became budget fact. An empty cell with a clear source gap is more trustworthy than a plausible guess.

Incident summaries follow the same rule. Counts and trends from ServiceNow are cited with ticket query definitions and date ranges. Dollar impact appears only when your cost model supplies a defensible rate.

License reclamation lines pull from Flexera reconciliation outputs. The reporter cross-references the license reclamation detector when that workflow has already flagged entitlements safe to reclaim. If reclamation is still in progress, savings from licenses appear as conditional line items with the verification flag set until SAM confirms release.

ServiceNow feeds CMDB application records, incident and problem history, and optionally financial management cost allocations. The reporter uses the application CI as the anchor key so incident rollups and support cost attribution stay scoped to the retiring system, not the whole platform.

Flexera (or Flexera One) supplies entitlement inventory, usage evidence, and contract metadata. The integration boundary is read-only export or API pull. The model does not change entitlements; it documents what finance can expect to recover once retirement and reclamation complete.

AWS contributes tagged infrastructure spend, reserved instance or savings plan commitments tied to the workload, and data transfer or storage costs that wind down after decommission. Where tags are incomplete, the report flags attribution gaps rather than spreading untagged spend across the application.

SAP (or your ERP of record) provides general ledger postings, cost center ownership, and the periods finance recognizes for approval. ERP figures win when SAM or cloud tooling disagrees with the books. The reporter surfaces discrepancies as reconciliation notes instead of silently picking one side.

All four systems answer different questions. ServiceNow explains operational pain. Flexera explains shelfware. AWS explains run-rate infrastructure. SAP explains what Finance will actually recognize. The LLM's job is synthesis and consistent formatting, not replacing those systems of record.

Finance can approve retirement even when not every line item is verified, provided the report separates known savings from conditional savings and documents residual risk.

Known savings carry verified amounts with cited sources and periods. Conditional savings depend on downstream work: completing secure wipe verification, enforcing data retention and deletion policy, and clearing dependencies identified by the decommission dependency mapper. The report lists those dependencies as gates. Until each gate passes, related savings lines remain blank or marked conditional.

Approvers receive a summary section written in finance language: total verified annual run-rate reduction, total conditional reduction pending reclamation or infra teardown, one-time retirement cost subtotal, net position at twelve months, and payback period where one-time costs apply. A short risk paragraph covers what happens if retirement slips: contract auto-renewal dates from Flexera, open incidents above threshold from ServiceNow, and any SAP commitments that require notice periods.

The model does not substitute for sign-off authority. It prepares the packet so the application owner, IT finance partner, and budget holder can approve or reject on evidence. Rejection with a clear list of missing extracts is still progress; it beats approval without traceability.

Run the cost-benefit reporter after dependency mapping confirms the application can retire in principle and before execution work begins in earnest. Early runs expose data gaps while there is still time to pull exports. Final runs attach to the change advisory or investment committee packet immediately before cutover.

Pair it with the related retire-stage capabilities on the same path: use the dependency mapper to scope what must move or disconnect, the retention enforcer and wipe auditor to satisfy compliance gates, and the license reclamation detector to turn SAM findings into verified savings lines. The reporter is the document that says, in one place, why retiring now is worth the effort and what Finance should expect on the ledger once the work is done.

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