It is possible to define a Budget on any level within your organisation. This enables different audiences to monitor costs across different clouds. When combining this feature with Notifications, a business owner can now set budget thresholds to inform customers, departments, or project owners when they are reaching their configured budget.
In order to create a budget, navigate to Accounts > Budgets. Then click the Create button to create a new budget. In this menu, a couple of items are presented:
Global options apply on the entire budget, and aply to the following items:
Interval: determine whether the budget is applied Monthly, Quarterly or Yearly
Apply to: a configured budget is by default applied to the total Charge of the configured Interval. It is however also possible to create a budget which is applied to the Cost of Cogs (COGS) instead
A budget configuration can potentially change year over year, and therefore it is possible to create different budget revisions. Each revision can have the following settings applied:
Revision start date: the start Month, Quarter or Year for this budget revision
Filter by: typically a budget is applied to a single or multiple Accounts. It is however possible to add additional filtering on Service or Service Category. By applying Service based filtering, it is possible to limit the scope for a configured budget
When a budget is created, it is possible to set a budget money amount for one or multiple accounts. In case each account for which a budget is set, also has 1 or multiple levels of child accounts, it is possible to control how the budget 'trickles down' the organisational structure:
Account selection: it is required to select an Account from any level in your Report Definition. It is the possible to set a budget value (i.e. $100000) in the grey box next to the Account.
The same applies to any Child Accounts for which you may set/overwrite a budget. You may add a Child Account to the list, by click the green button left of the account name
NOTE: a child account may also be excluded from a budget, by clicking the Exclude checkbox right of the name of the Account
Remainder: using the Remainder drop-down it is possible to control the distribution of the budget towards child accounts. The two options to pick by default are:
even: each child account will get an even amount of budget. Example :Consider a top level account 'ACME Corp' with a monthly budget set of $100.000. When 'ACME Corp' has 10 child 'Business Unit' accounts , each of these 'Business Units' will get an even amount of the budget: In this case this will be $10.000.
shared: when the distribution of the remainer is set to shared, the consumption of child accounts is ignored. As long as the total spendings of all child accounts does not go beyond the configured budget. Example: Consider a top level account 'ACME Corp' with a monthly budget set of $100.000. When 'ACME Corp' has 10 child 'Business Unit' accounts , each of these 'Business Units' combined should not use more then $100.000.
none: the option to not distribute any remainders is only applicable when overriding the budget percentage for each child account. This means it is required set a distinct budget percentage manually for each child account.
To create the Budget, click the Create button. It is now possible to view the spendings under budget via the Budget Report
An existing budget can be changed by navigating to Accounts > Budgets, and then clicking the budget which you want to change.
Once a budget has been saved, you will be unable to change the start date unless you edit the Budget Revision:
Once you have enabled edit mode for an existing Budget Revision, you will be able to change the start date:
After making these changes you will need to save these by click the blue checkbox on the right. You can also cancel your changed using the blue x-sign, or delete the revision by clicking the red recycle bin.
Similar to changing a Budget Revision, it is possible to add a new revision that holds a different start date with revised budget plan. To do this, you will need to click the green + sign:
