Track and allocate your IT costs

Actionable cost insights that align with your business objectives
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Why Cloud Financial Management with AWS?

The dynamic nature of cloud usage allows you to quickly scale up and down resources, according to real-time business needs. Such agility and scalability also drive the need for cost visibility and control. This allows you to track and understand your cloud investment and its value, and influence efficient technology resource consumption behavior. To achieve cost transparency and accountability, you need to have a unified view of your billing and usage and be able to organize your cost and usage data. This ensures they are meaningful and can be aligned with your business outcomes.

AWS provides tools for you to get a single pane view for your AWS cost and usage incurred by all of your users. You can manage your bills and payment, customize and report your cost and usage data, and allocate charges back to your business entities, e.g. teams, projects, or products.

Benefits

Centrally manage your billing and payment for multiple accounts, and monitor trends to understand the cost drivers and any concerning factors. Analyze data in an aggregated view or by various dimensions, and download reports or ingest cost and usage data into Business Intelligence tools of your choice, for more consumable insights.

Define tagging and allocation strategies that speak to your business structure and financial management process, and tie your cost and usage data closely with business outcomes. Use a variety of AWS organizational and billing resources to structure your accounts and resources, and enable more meaningful and granular level cost and usage reporting.

Run your IT shop like a business: attribute cost and usage back to the right entities to evaluate the performance and profitability, prioritize and adjust investment decisions accordingly. Modify your architectural design, product pricing strategy, and cost allocation model to maximize your margins with the end-user cost insights in mind.

Use Cases

You want to trace cost and usage information back to specific teams, projects, and business initiatives.

With AWS Cost Allocation Tags, and AWS Marketplace Vendor Metered Tagging, you can apply meaningful metadata to your AWS usage and software purchased through AWS Marketplace. AWS Cost Categories allows you to create rules to logically group cost and usage information by account, tags, service, charge type, or other cost categories. These metadata information and grouping mechanisms will be available in various AWS Cost Management products, such as AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Cost & Usage Reports, and AWS Budgets.

You need a single pane view of your cost and usage information to understand cost trends and drivers.

With AWS Cost Explorer, you will have an out-of-the-box reporting solution to visualize your cost and usage by filtering and grouping with a few dimensions. You can also forecast and understand how your cost and usage looks like and plan ahead. If you need finer granularity of your cost and usage information and ingest your cost and usage data for downstream processing and further intelligence analysis, you can download AWS Cost & Usage Report (CUR) from the Amazon S3 bucket, query CUR using Amazon Athena, or visualize the CUR data in Amazon QuickSight.

You want a simple process to view and charge your AWS costs back to end users in the way you deem as appropriate.

AWS Billing Conductor allows you to customize AWS pricing and billing report that aligns with your business logic. You can group accounts according to their financial relationships, adjust rating, share credits and savings, and add overhead costs, that speak to your cost allocation needs. For multi-tenant application cost reporting, you can use AWS Application Cost Profiler to collect and correlate your tenant usage data with your AWS billing information and generate a tenant-specific report with hourly granularity on a daily, monthly basis, or both.