Viewing Costs By Cost Category

Example

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

1. You can identify the responsible department for most of the costs by using the tags you attached to the specific resources. Suppose department A additionally deploys the CDN service, whose resources cannot be tagged, and 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.

   

2. You need to create cost categories for further cost allocation. Four 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

1. Log in to Cost Center.
2. Choose Cost Organization > Cost Categories.
3. Create cost categories and configure their basic rules by referring to Example.

   

4. Define cost splitting rules four hours after the creation, by referring to Example.

   

Step 2: Viewing Cost Details

1. Log in to Cost Center.
2. Choose Cost Categories.
3. 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.

4. View cost details by cost category.

   Choose Cost Details Export. On the Export to Local Directory page, export the original or amortized cost details file (for example, file name: %Account name%_AmortizedCostDetailByUsage_YYYY-MM), and then you can view the cost details by cost category.