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Use this guide to decide whether to start with showback or chargeback, choose the right Vantage allocation method, build reusable reports, and keep ownership current as teams change.
This guide is for FinOps and Finance teams that need to attribute cloud spend to teams, products, business units, or cost centers.

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Step 1: Choose Showback or Chargeback

These two words are often used interchangeably, but they represent different commitments. Showback reports each team its share of the bill for visibility. Chargeback takes those same numbers and posts them to the team’s actual budget or P&L, which moves money inside your company. Start with showback unless Finance has already approved the cost centers, allocation rules, and accounting process that will use the numbers. The same Virtual Tags and Cost Reports can support both. The difference is whether the report is informational or whether Finance posts the result to a budget, cost center, or P&L.

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Step 2: Get the Allocation Foundation Right

Allocation depends on the cost data and metadata Vantage receives from your providers. Two layers matter here:
  1. Provider tags. These come from AWS, Azure, GCP, and other providers. They determine which tag keys and values Vantage can use from imported provider cost data. To see what Vantage has imported, open Settings > Tags and review the keys and values on the All Tags tab.
  2. Virtual Tags. Virtual Tags standardize inconsistent keys, label costs that lack usable provider tags, and split shared costs across owners inside Vantage without changing cloud resources.
Before you build your allocation structure, set an internal coverage target. Track coverage with the report in Step 6: Measure Allocation Coverage.

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Step 3: Choose Your Allocation Method

A Virtual Tag value can relabel matching costs or allocate costs across owners. Choose the method based on how ownership is decided. Use Cost-Based when the split should move with usage. Use Percent-Based when Finance has approved a fixed ratio.

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Custom Value: Standardize and Label

Use Custom Value tags to turn provider-specific filters into one reporting value. For example, one team may use env, another Environment, and another environment. A Custom Value tag, or Tag Key Collapsing when you only need to merge keys, gives you one clean key to report on. Custom Value tags also handle costs that lack usable provider tags. For example, create a Custom Value with an Output Costs Filter scoped by provider, category, service, resource ID, or tag, then give those matching costs a reporting value.

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Cost-Based: Split a Shared Cost by Usage

Use this when a shared charge should land on teams in proportion to how much of the underlying service they used. In a Cost-Based value on your team tag:
  • Input Costs Filter: The usage costs that should determine the split, often filtered to Charge Type Usage.
  • Tag Key: your existing owner tag, such as team.
  • Output Costs Filter: the shared cost you want to split.
If Infrastructure drove 50% of tagged usage, Mobile 20%, and Data 30%, Vantage splits the shared charge 50/20/30 and recomputes that split as usage shifts month to month.
See an example with screenshots in the Tagging example docs.

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Percent-Based: Split a Shared Cost by a Fixed Ratio

Use this for negotiated or contractual splits that should not move with usage, like a Marketplace purchase. In a Percent-Based value on your team tag:
  • Output Costs Filter: Marketplace purchases only.
  • Values and percentages: infra 60, mobile 30, data 10.
A Percent-Based tag requires at least two values, each percentage must be greater than 0% and less than 100%, and the percentages must total exactly 100%. Vantage shows a running total as you allocate so you can see when you reach 100%.
See an example with screenshots in the Tagging example docs.

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Business Metric-Based: Split by a Real Driver

When a cost should follow something measurable, like seats per business unit or requests per product, connect a business metric and let it drive the split. Vantage allocates each owner its share of the cost in proportion to its share of the metric.
The business metric has to cover the same dates as the costs you are allocating. If your imported metric stops at an earlier month, the recent costs it should split will get no allocation at all. Keep the metric current, especially at year boundaries when a stale import is easy to miss.
See an example with screenshots in the Tagging example docs.

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Step 4: Model Shared Costs Deliberately

Shared costs need explicit allocation rules. Decide the split with Finance before you encode it in Vantage. Allocate each shared cost once. If the same support fee or Marketplace charge is allocated through two different tags, reports will not reconcile cleanly against the bill.

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Step 5: Build the Report

With your tags in place, create a Cost Report and group by your team or business-unit Virtual Tag. Save that scope as a Saved Filter so the same filter definition can be reused on reports and dashboards. Group per-team reports into Folders so each team has one place to look.
For recurring setup, use the Vantage API to create and update Cost Reports, Saved Filters, Virtual Tags, Budgets, and Report Notifications from your team’s source of truth.
For a one-off showback, you can also use report-level Percent-Based Cost Allocation. Click Add Cost Allocation on a filter set and set a showback percentage. This is report-scoped and does not create a reusable tag, so use a Percent-Based Virtual Tag for durable allocation logic.

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Step 6: Measure Allocation Coverage and Close the Gap

Track how much of the bill maps to a known owner. Build an unallocated report and watch it shrink:
1

Duplicate your all-spend report

Start from a report that shows total cost with no team filter.
2

Group by Tagged

Open the Group By menu and select Tagged, or filter Tagged Status to untagged, against your primary tag (for example, team or cost-center). This separates attributed spend from spend that has no owner.
3

Save it as Untagged Spend

Keep it alongside your team reports so it is easy to check each week.
4

Track coverage

Read coverage as one minus untagged over total. The largest untagged services tell you where to add the next Custom Value or allocation rule.

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Step 7: Set Team Budgets for Accountability

Once teams own their allocated costs, give each one a Budget attached to its Cost Report. Start with one budget per team and review it monthly.

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Step 8: Distribute to Stakeholders

Put the numbers in front of the people who own the spend.
  • Report Notifications send Cost Reports to email, Slack, or Microsoft Teams on a daily, weekly, or monthly cadence, where those channels are configured and available. By default, monthly notifications go out on the second of the month, weekly notifications go out on Mondays, and cost data is delayed two days. Note that notifications do not attach a CSV.
  • Dashboards give each team or executive a single view. Combine them with saved filters for per-team versions.
  • Exports handle the finance handoff. Export a report as CSV, PDF, or in the FOCUS schema from the export flow.
  • Recurring data pulls into another system should use the Vantage API rather than the console, since notifications do not carry raw CSV data.

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Step 9: Handle Reorganizations and Ownership Changes

Teams merge, split, and rename. Virtual Tag time frames let a tag value apply only during a defined date range. Say a shared cluster belonged to infrastructure through June 30, then moved to platform on July 1:
  • Value infrastructure: set the Output Costs Filter for the cluster, enable Set a Time Frame, leave the Start Date empty, and set the End Date to June 30.
  • Value platform: use the same Output Costs Filter, enable a time frame, and set the Start Date to July 1.
Time frames work at daily granularity by default, and the first matching rule wins. Costs are attributed according to the time frame for their incurred date, so historical periods keep the owner defined for that date range. The worked version is in the time-bound example.

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Confirm Your Model Works

Your showback or chargeback model is well established when all of the following are true:
  • Allocation coverage is at or above your target.
  • Every shared cost has one allocation method.
  • Each team has a Cost Report, a saved filter, and a budget.
  • Reports are scheduled to the people who own the spend.
  • Ownership changes are handled with time frames.