What Is a Cost Category and How Does It Work?

A cost category is a tool that can automatically group your costs based on the rules you configure, such as linked account, service type, bill type, cost tag, and enterprise project, or even the customized rules of other cost categories. There are multiple ways of looking at your business, for example, in terms of departments, projects, or applications. A cost category is a unique way, and you can create multiple cost categories accordingly.

You can define split rules to allocate shared costs across your cost categories, for example, the costs for the resources (network, storage, or resource packages) shared across departments or the costs that cannot be directly split by cost tag or enterprise project configured for the resources. Currently, only net original costs (actual payment) and net amortized costs (amortized actual payment) can be split.

Once cost categories are created or edited, you will be able to view your cost and usage information by these categories starting at the beginning of the month. After you create a cost category, it can take up to four hours to apply the cost category for cost analysis, anomaly detection, and budget management. You can use the cost categories to summarize or filter costs and usage. You can learn about the application of cost categories in the exported cost details where each created category is displayed in a separate column.