3.1.7 Billed Cost

Billed Cost represents the cost of a charge as invoiced by the invoice issuer in a given billing period. Billed Cost differs from Effective Cost when covering charges (e.g., prepaid or postpaid commitment purchases) are recorded separately from the covered charges to which they are applied.

For all charges, Billed Cost reflects all applicable pricing adjustments (e.g., reduced pricing from negotiated discounts or commitment discounts). For purchase charges, Billed Cost includes any portion invoiced in the given billing period. For usage charges, Billed Cost excludes any portion covered by related purchase charges (e.g., covering charges such as commitments, prepayments, or marketplace purchases), regardless of when those related charges are invoiced.

Billed Cost is denominated in the Billing Currency. Billed Cost is commonly used to support FinOps activities, including invoice reconciliation, cash-based forecasting, budgeting, and cost allocation.

BilledCost MUST adhere to the following requirements:

• BilledCost MUST be of type Decimal.
• BilledCost MUST conform to NumericFormat requirements.
• BilledCost MUST NOT be null.
• BilledCost MUST be denominated in the BillingCurrency.
• BilledCost MUST reflect all applicable pricing adjustments, including but not limited to negotiated discounts, commitment discounts, and other applicable discount programs.
• BilledCost MUST NOT include any portion of a covered charge that is offset by a covering charge.
• BilledCost MUST be 0 for charges that are fully covered by one or more covering charges.
• BilledCost MUST reflect amounts as invoiced by the InvoiceIssuerName, not estimated or inferred values.
• BilledCost MUST be 0 for charges generated by entities that are not responsible or authorized for invoicing, to avoid double-counting when merging multiple dataset instances.
• The sum of BilledCost for a given InvoiceId and InvoiceIssuerName MUST NOT differ from the payable amount provided on the corresponding invoice by more than the Rounding Variance Tolerance when the corresponding invoice has been issued.
• The sum of BilledCost MAY differ from preliminary or estimated invoiced amounts when the corresponding invoice has not yet been issued.

3.1.7.2.1 Handling Rounding Discrepancies

When validating the sum of BilledCost against the payable amount on an issued invoice, the totals may not be perfectly equal due to precision differences (e.g., 6 or more decimal places in cost and usage data vs. 2 decimal places on the invoice). The requirement allows for a maximum rounding error based on the statistical probability of rounding variance, which grows with the square root of the row count. For more information, see the Rounding Variance Tolerance appendix entry.

Cost of a charge as invoiced by the invoice issuer in a given billing period.