Estimate your cloud costs
During your cloud journey, there are many tools available to help you understand pricing:
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How charges are processed
To understand how Cost Management works, you should first understand the Commerce system.
At its core, Microsoft Commerce is a data pipeline that underpins all Microsoft commercial transactions, whether consumer or commercial.
While there are many inputs and connections to this pipeline, like the sign-up and Marketplace purchase experiences, this article focuses on the components that help you monitor, allocate, and optimize your costs.
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Organize and allocate costs
Organizing and allocating costs are critical to ensuring invoices are routed to the correct business units and can be further split for internal billing, also known as chargeback.
The first step to allocating cloud costs is organizing subscriptions and resources in a way that facilitates natural reporting and chargeback.
Microsoft offers the following options to organize resources and subscriptions:
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Overview
Microsoft Cost Management is a suite of FinOps tools that help organizations analyze, monitor, and optimize their Microsoft Cloud costs.
Cost Management is available to anyone with access to a billing account, subscription, resource group, or management group.
You can access Cost Management within the billing and resource management experiences or separately as a standalone tool optimized for FinOps teams who manage cost across multiple scopes.
You can also automate and extend native capabilities or enrich your own tools and processes with cost to maximize organizational visibility and accountability with all stakeholders and realize your optimization and efficiency goals faster.
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What data is included in Cost Management and Billing?
Within the Billing experience, you can manage all the products, subscriptions, and recurring purchases you use; review your credits and commitments; and view and pay your invoices.
Invoices are available online or as PDFs and include all billed charges and any applicable taxes.
Credits are applied to the total invoice amount when invoices are generated.
This invoicing process happens in parallel to Cost Management data processing, which means Cost Management doesn't include credits, taxes, and some purchases, like support charges in non-MCA accounts.
