Application Scenarios

Example Scenario

You want to allocate costs across Department A, Department B, and Department C in your company, and the department of most of the costs can be identified based on the tags configured for the resources. In addition, Department A uses the Face Recognition Service that does not support tag management, and an Elastic Volume Service (EVS) is shared across all departments.

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.

Step 1 Creating Cost Tags

Create tags before using cloud services. For details, see Creating Predefined Tags. For example, you can create the tag key Group with three tag values (DepartmentA, DepartmentB, and DepartmentC).

Step 2 Activating Cost Tags

Activate the created tag Group so that it can be applied to cost categories.

Step 3 Creating Cost Categories (Defining Rules)

Create a cost category and define the following rules for it.

Table 1 Defining rules

Rule	Type	Content
Rule 1: Inherited Value - Cost Tags	Use existing rules. NOTE: If you have used existing cost tags or enterprise projects to group cost data, existing rules are recommended. Example: If rules are defined based on the cost tag Group, cost data will be grouped for DepartmentA, DepartmentB, and DepartmentC.	Condition: Inherited Dimension is Cost Tag, and Tag Key is Group.
Rule 2: Department A	Add rules.	Condition: Service Type is FRS Face Recognition Service.
Rule 3: Shared costs	Add rules.	Condition: Service Type is Elastic Volume Service.
Uncategorized costs	-	Costs that do not match the preceding rules.

Figure 1 Creating rules

In this example, costs are amortized in the way described in Table 2.

Step 4 Creating Cost Categories (Allocating Shared Costs)

Four hours after the cost category is created, you can define cost splitting rules to split the shared costs across departments.

• Select Custom for Allocation Method to allocate 50% of the shared costs to Department A, 30% to Department B, and 20% to Department C.
• Select Custom for Allocation Method to allocate 30% of the uncategorized costs to Department A, 30% to Department B, and 40% to Department C.
  

  Currently, there are three cost allocation methods:

  • Proportionally: Allocate your costs in proportion to the weight of each target value.

    Example: Suppose the value of target B is $800 USD and the value of target C is $200 USD. As the ratio of target B to target C is 4:1, 80% of the source value will be allocated to target B and 20% to target C.

  • Evenly: Allocate your costs evenly across your target values.

    Example: Suppose there are two target values (A and B). With this method, the source value is evenly allocated to A and B, 50% for each.

  • Custom: Allocate your costs based on a custom percentage for each target value. The percentages must add up to 100%.
  Figure 2 Defining splitting rules

  

  Table 3 Cost splitting rules

  Rule	Source Value	Target Value	Allocation Method	Content	Associated Cost ($)
  Rule 1	Uncategorized costs	Department A Department B Department C	Custom	Department A: 50% Department B: 30% Department C: 20%	Department A: 100 x 50% = 50 Department B: 100 x 30% = 30 Department C: 100 x 20% = 20
  Rule 2	Shared costs	Department A Department B Department C	Custom	Department A: 30% Department B: 30% Department C: 40%	Department A: 40 x 30% = 12 Department B: 40 x 30% = 12 Department C: 40 x 40% = 16

Step 5 Viewing Cost Splitting Results