Invoices are an important part of your ability to record and track spending and attribute it back to purchase orders and department budgets. They’re also often required for enterprises by law for financial record keeping and audits.

However, a typical invoice doesn’t offer the level of detail that a financial operations (FinOps) team needs to accurately report out across all your cloud services, your organizational hierarchy, and how you use those services. Our data shows that many companies use dozens of Google Cloud services, across tens to hundreds of projects, and some of our customers’ invoices are over 20 pages long! Nor do invoices let FinOps teams perform data-driven analysis or predict future cloud costs.

At Google Cloud, we enable you to monitor and analyze costs by providing transparency and clarity about your cloud spending. We provide tools that present a timely, consistent, relevant and complete records of all your charges, credits, and payments.

Instead of overloading invoices with all this detail, we’ve been simplifying them—pointing you to the Google Cloud Console for granular details of all your cloud consumption. At the same time, we’re creating more detailed cost analytics tools in the Cloud Console, including new graph and table views, plus ways to export billing data to CSV and BigQuery. With this approach, we think you’ll get easier access to the information you need, according to your role in your company—so you can better analyze costs and predict future expenditures.

Let’s take a look at some of the cost management tools in the Cloud Console, and how to use them.

Cloud Console, reporting for billing duty

There are two main pages in the Cloud Console designed to help you understand your costs: Cloud Billing reports and the Cost Table report.

The Billing Reports page lets you view usage costs at a glance so you can discover and analyze trends. It’s especially useful because it lets you see which products and geographical regions contributed to the most spend in a simple and chart-based format, and analyze costs by your organizational structure, which are often represented as Folders, Projects or Labels.

The Cost Table report, on the other hand, presents a detailed, tabular view of your monthly costs for a given invoice month. The Cost Table matches your statement total, effectively reconciling your invoice. Then, you can dynamically filter, sort and group the various line items, so you can better understand the costs associated with your invoice.

Examples always help, so let’s take a look at a few ways of analyzing your invoice that you can now perform from Cloud Console’s Billing Reports and Cost Table pages. We’ve added many features to these areas in the past year, and plan to continue to invest heavily in these pages going forward.

#management tools #google cloud platform #cost management