Overview of a Cost Category
A cost category automatically groups your costs based on the rules you configure, such as linked account, service type, bill type, cost tag, and enterprise project, or even the custom rules configured for other cost categories.
A cost category goes into effect at the beginning of each month. If you add or modify a cost category in the middle of a month, month-to-date cost data will use the new cost category. After you create or edit a cost category, it can take up to four hours for your cost and usage details to be categorized.
Categorized Cost Information
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. If you are using a master account and have enabled unified accounting management, you can also use cost categories to group the costs of your enterprise. For details, see Cost Management for Enterprises.
After creating a cost category, you can use it to analyze and monitor your costs and manage your budgets. You can use cost categories to summarize or filter cost and usage data. You can also learn about the application of cost categories in the exported cost details, where each created category is displayed in a separate column.
Splitting Shared Costs
Shared costs include 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. These costs are not directly attributable to a singular owner, and hence cannot be categorized into a singular cost category. In this case, you can define cost splitting rules to fairly allocate these costs among teams or business units.
You can use cost categories to split shared costs, and also create custom categories and map your costs into these categories based on the splitting rules you define. Only net original costs (actual payments) and net amortized costs (amortized actual payments) can be split.
Establishing Multilevel Hierarchical Relationships
You can select from a list of cost category dimensions to create your cost category rules. Specifically, use existing cost categories as the prerequisites and define your own cost splitting rules. Assume that your enterprise has cost units from multiple departments and each department has multiple teams within. You can create multilevel hierarchical relationships among your cost categories to replicate your organizational structure. This way, you can easily track the cost usage of each team.
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