Viewing Cost By Cost Category

You can use cost categories to group costs by linked account, service type, bill type, cost tag, and enterprise project, or you can group costs based on custom rules you configured for these cost categories.

Example

You need to allocate costs among departments A, B, and C.

You can identify the responsible department for most of the costs by using the tags you attach to the specific resources. Suppose department A additionally deploys the CDN service, whose resources cannot be tagged. In addition, all the departments share the Cloud Phone service.
As mentioned earlier, you can use the tag key Group and tag values Department A, Department B, and Department C to group most of your costs, as shown in the following figure.
You need to create cost categories for further cost allocation. 48 hours after the creation, you can define cost splitting rules to split the shared cost across those departments.
- Select Custom for Allocation Method to split the unallocated cost, with 50% allocated to Department A, 30% to Department B, and 20% to Department C.
- Select Custom for Allocation Method to split the shared cost, with 30% allocated to Department A, 30% to Department B, and 40% to Department C.

Step 1: Creating Cost Categories

Log in to Cost Center.
Choose Cost Categories.
Create cost categories and configure their basic rules by referring to Example.
Define cost splitting rules 48 hours after the creation, by referring to Example.

Step 2: Viewing Cost Details

Log in to Cost Center.
Choose Cost Categories.
Click the link to the name of a cost category to view the cost details.

In this figure, the net amortized cost is displayed for each proportion.
- Net Amortized Cost: the net amortized cost after costs are split based on defined rules
- Split Amount: the amount split from the shared cost. If the amount is negative, the corresponding cost is the split source.
- Amount Allocated: the amount actually allocated to each tag value. Amount Allocated = Net Amortized Cost + Split Amount
- Proportion: the percentage of an allocated cost to the total cost allocated
You can interpret the split amount for each department in the following way:
- Department A
  Net cost amortized by cost tag: $5.94 USD
  
  Split amount for allocated shared cost and unallocated cost: 30% x 1251.51 + 50% x 2452416.75 = $1,226,583.828 USD
  
  Total amount allocated: 5.94 + 1,226,583.828 = $1,226,589.768 USD
- Department B
  Net cost amortized by cost tag: $0 USD
  
  Split amount for allocated shared cost and unallocated cost: 30% x 1251.51 + 30% x 2452416.75 = $736,100.478 USD
  
  Total amount allocated: 0 + 736,100.478 = $736,100.478 USD
- Department C
  Net cost amortized by cost tag: $0 USD
  
  Split amount for allocated shared cost and unallocated cost: 40% x 1251.51 + 20% x 2452416.75 = $490,983.954 USD
  
  Total amount allocated: 0 + 490,983.954 = $490,983.954 USD
- Shared cost and unallocated cost
  If they have all been split to Department A, Department B, and Department C, then the amount allocated is 0.
View cost details by cost category.

Click Export to export the cost details file for original costs or amortized costs (file name for amortized costs: % account name %_AmortizedCostDetailByUsage_YYYY-MM). In the file, you can view cost details by cost category.