What Is Cost Allocation?
Cost allocation is the process of assigning costs to different parts of an organization, such as teams, projects, or business units, to accurately track and manage expenses. In Vantage, cost allocation is built on virtual tags. Virtual tags allow you to create consistent and standardized tags across all cloud providers within Vantage. You can tag costs without needing to make changes to your existing cloud infrastructure. Virtual tags are useful for ensuring uniform tagging practices. With nested virtual tags, you can also build hierarchies, such as mapping applications to teams and teams to business units, and then view that allocation in Cost Reports.Why Should I Use Cost Allocation?
Using virtual tags in Vantage helps you gain better control over your cloud spending. Virtual tags ensure consistent and accurate cost tagging across all cloud providers, making your financial reporting more reliable. Nested virtual tags let you organize that tagged data into a hierarchy that mirrors your organization, so you can allocate costs effectively and find costs that have not been assigned an owner.Cost Allocation Use Cases
- Financial Analyst
- Cloud Operations Manager
As a financial analyst, you can:
- Use virtual tags to standardize tagging across all cloud providers without involving the engineering team, ensuring that your financial reports are uniform and reliable.
- Use nested virtual tags to roll tagged costs up to business units or cost centers, then group a Cost Report by that tag to see which costs still lack an owner. This improves financial accountability by ensuring no costs are overlooked in your financial reports.
Lesson 1: Introduction to Tagging
Lesson 2: Create Virtual Tags
Lesson 3: Additional Tagging Workflows
Additional Resources
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