7 Glossary

An accounting method used in technology cost management to record costs in the period when resources are utilized, services are delivered, or entitlements are available for or actually consumed (including unused or expired entitlements). This approach ensures that expenses are recognized in the same timeframe as the value they provide, independent of when charges are invoiced.

A charge representing a modification to billing data to account for certain events or circumstances not previously captured, or captured incorrectly. Examples include billing errors, service disruptions, or pricing changes.

The charge that was created as the result of an allocation operation. This is used in the context of Data Generator-Calculated Split Cost Allocation to identify the charges that were created from the origin charge resulting from the application of Data Generator-Calculated Split Cost Allocation.

The process or formula by which cost is being allocated from an origin charge to produce allocated charges. This is used in the context of Data Generator-Calculated Split Cost Allocation which requires documentation of the method to be provided for any and all allocated methods used. May also be colloquially referred to as allocation method.

The distribution of upfront costs over time to accurately reflect the consumption or benefit derived from the associated resources or services. Amortization is valuable when the commitment period extends beyond the granularity of the source report.

A collection of geographically separated locations containing a data center or cluster of data centers. Each availability zone (AZ) should have its own power, cooling, and networking, to provide redundancy and fault tolerance.

A container for resources and/or services that are billed together in an invoice. A billing account may have sub accounts, all of whose costs are consolidated and invoiced to the billing account.

An identifier that represents the currency that a charge for resources and/or services was billed in.

The time window that an organization receives an invoice for, inclusive of the start date and exclusive of the end date. It is independent of the time of usage and consumption of resources and services.

A pricing approach where the cost of a particular resource or service is determined based on predefined quantities or tiers of usage. In these scenarios, the Pricing Unit and the corresponding Pricing Quantity can be different from the Consumed Unit and Consumed Quantity.

An accounting method used in technology cost management to record costs in the period when charges are invoiced. This approach aligns expenses with billing cycles, independent of when resources are utilized, services are delivered, or entitlements are available for or actually consumed (including unused or expired entitlements).

A capacity reservation is an agreement that secures a dedicated amount of resources or services for a specified period. This ensures the reserved capacity is always available and accessible, even if it's not fully utilized. Customers are typically charged for the reserved capacity, regardless of actual consumption.

A row in a FOCUS-compatible cost and usage dataset.

The time window for which a charge is effective, inclusive of the start date and exclusive of the end date. The charge period for continuous usage should match the time granularity of the dataset instance (e.g., 1 hour for hourly, 1 day for daily). The charge period for a non-usage charge with time boundaries should match the period of eligibility.

A billing period with Billing Period Status set to "Closed". The period has been financially closed after all anticipated invoices for the period have been issued by designated invoice issuers and no additional invoices will be associated with this period. Exceptionally, additional invoices may be associated with a closed billing period if explicitly requested or approved by the customer.

A company or organization that provides remote access to computing resources, infrastructure, or applications for a fee.

A customer's agreement to either spend a defined monetary amount or consume a specific quantity of resources or services over a specified period.

A publicly available contract commitment that provides discounted pricing on preselected SKUs in exchange for a commitment to specific spend or usage goals over a specified period, based on publicly disclosed standard terms and pricing. Committed spend or usage is evenly distributed across predefined Contract Commitment Fulfillment Intervals (e.g., hourly), and unused benefits cannot be carried over to subsequent Intervals. Only one commitment discount may be applied to a single charge at a time, and it may overlap with one or more negotiated discounts.

This term has been used in the past by FinOps teams managing Public Cloud to refer to specific contract commitments (including Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and Committed Use Discounts) offered by cloud providers, and is defined here to maintain consistency with the terms of that subset of contract commitments.

Commitment discounts are classified with the following designations:

• Contract Commitment Offer Category: "Public"
• Contract Commitment Benefit Category: "Discount"
• Contract Commitment Model: "Continuous"
• Unused benefits cannot be carried over to subsequent Contract Commitment Fulfillment Intervals

A feature of commitment discounts that may further transform the predetermined amount of usage purchased or consumed based on additional, service-provider-specific requirements.

A service-provider offering that allows a customer to enter into a commitment. Commitment programs include commitment discounts, capacity reservations, and other constructs that require advance spend or usage agreements.

A collection of agreed terms between a service provider and a customer.

A specific term within a contract that defines a measurable obligation agreed upon by a provider and a customer, such as a minimum spend or usage over an agreed period of time.

The agreed-upon unit price for a single Pricing Unit of the associated SKU, inclusive of negotiated discounts, if present, and exclusive of any other discounts. This price is denominated in the Billing Currency.

Any modification (including updates, additions, or omissions) to previously delivered records within a defined delivery scope (e.g., temporal grouping such as a billing period or non-temporal, logical grouping such as a contract).

A correction (lowercase) may consist of one or more simultaneous changes, including updates to or omission of previously delivered records, or the addition of new records that supplement previously delivered data within the affected delivery scope. This concept applies across all FOCUS datasets.

In contrast to the broader concept of correction (lowercase), the term "Correction" (capitalized) refers to a specific allowed value in the Charge Class column in Cost and Usage datasets. It designates charges used to correct cost or usage data from a previously closed billing period.

A charge whose Billed Cost is fully or partially absorbed by a corresponding covering charge. Common examples include usage charges applied against commitment discounts, or consumption of SaaS offerings drawn from a prepayment, such as marketplace purchases.

A purchase charge whose cost is applied against one or more covered charges, offsetting their Billed Cost. Common examples include commitment discount purchases, prepayment charges, and marketplace purchases that cover consumption-based usage.

A financial incentive or allowance granted by a service provider unrelated to other past/current/future charges.

A column not defined by FOCUS and included in a FOCUS dataset. Custom columns are prefixed with x_ and provide additional context from native datasets beyond what is captured in FOCUS columns. See Dataset Completeness for inclusion requirements.

An abbreviated term for dataset instance artifact.

A specific implementation of a FOCUS dataset provided by a data generator. A Data Generator may provide multiple dataset instances of the same FOCUS dataset, each with different properties such as time granularity or differing custom column inclusions. For example, the same 'FOCUS Cost and Usage' FOCUS dataset may be provided at an hourly or daily time granularity by a Data Generator. Each would be a distinct Dataset Instance.

A physical representation of a specific dataset instance delivered by a data generator.

A dataset-specific boundary or set of boundaries that determines which records are included in a dataset artifact delivery. Scopes can be temporal (e.g., a billing period) or non-temporal (e.g., a contract or other logical grouping), and multiple scopes may be applicable for a single dataset depending on use case or delivery configuration. Scopes determine how Overwrite and Append dataset artifact deliveries, as well as corrections, are applied.

A specification-defined categorical attribute that provides context or categorization to billing data.

A Date/Time Format value that is not contained within the ending bound of a time period.

A tag with one tag value chosen from a set of possible tag values after being processed by a set of service-provider-defined or user-defined rules.

An open-source specification that defines requirements for billing data.

A column defined by FOCUS and included in a FOCUS dataset. See the Columns section of each dataset for definitions.

A structured collection of columns that conforms to the BCP14 criteria established by FOCUS. All columns included must be defined in the FOCUS Columns section of the specification.

In addition to these standardized columns, data generators include custom columns to capture information from native datasets that is not represented by FOCUS columns. If custom columns introduce record-splitting (i.e., a single original charge results in multiple rows), the data generator is responsible for ensuring that all cost and quantity metrics still meet the aggregation and consistency rules required by the specification.

The collection of datasets are designed to provide billing insight, additional context, metadata, mapping, or enrichment information that enhances the interpretability or completeness. See also: Native Dataset.

A column included in a FOCUS dataset. A FOCUS dataset column is either a FOCUS column or a custom column.

A Date/Time Format value that is contained within the beginning bound of a time period.

A category of compute resources that can be paused or terminated by the CSP within certain criteria, often advertised at reduced unit pricing when compared to the equivalent non-interruptible resource.

A document that summarizes the charges for resources or services consumed by a customer.

An entity responsible for issuing payable invoices for the resources or services consumed. Common examples include cloud service providers, managed service providers, or marketplace operators.

The process of verifying that the costs, quantities, and applied adjustments on an invoice are equal to the underlying usage records and contracted rates for a specific billing period.

In the context of FOCUS, this process ensures consistency by reconciling cost and usage data across the invoice, the Invoice Detail dataset, and the Cost and Usage dataset to identify and resolve any discrepancies.

An invoice that has been formally reconciled and issued by the designated invoice issuer (Invoice Issue Status set to "Issued"). Once issued, the invoice becomes the authoritative financial document and is considered finalized. The financial data presented on the invoice is not expected to change.

A common acronym for JavaScript Object Notation, a data format codified in ECMA-404 as a standard for human-readable, serializable data objects. This data format is used in FOCUS to communicate multiple pieces of information about a charge (tags, properties, etc.) in a single column.

The suggested service-provider-published unit price for a single Pricing Unit of the associated SKU, exclusive of any discounts. This price is denominated in the Billing Currency.

A company or organization that provides outsourced management and support of a range of IT services, such as network infrastructure, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and more.

A FOCUS-defined column that provides numeric values, allowing for aggregation operations such as arithmetic operations (sum, multiplication, averaging etc.) and statistical operations.

A government-issued currency (e.g., US dollars, Euros).

A dataset provided by a data generator in a format other than FOCUS. For service providers, this typically refers to their proprietary data exports (e.g., billing exports, contract details, or other FinOps-related datasets). For FinOps tool vendors, this refers to any non-FOCUS dataset they offer to practitioners. See also: FOCUS Dataset.

A privately agreed contract commitment that provides discounted pricing in exchange for a commitment to specific spend or usage goals over a specified period, with terms and pricing specifically modified from standard. Multiple negotiated discounts may be applied to a single charge at a time, and they may overlap with a commitment discount.

Negotiated discounts are classified with the following designations:

• Contract Commitment Offer Category: "Negotiated"
• Contract Commitment Benefit Category: "Discount"

A service that is available and provided immediately or as needed, without requiring a pre-scheduled appointment or prior arrangement. In cloud computing, virtual machines can be created and terminated as needed, i.e., on demand.

A billing period with Billing Period Status set to "Open". Billing activities are ongoing, and the period remains subject to updates until formally closed.

The charge that existed prior to an operation. This is used in the context of Data Generator-Calculated Split Cost Allocation to identify the charge that existed prior to the application of Data Generator-Calculated Split Cost Allocation to produce allocated charges.

Pascal Case (PascalCase, also known as UpperCamelCase) is a format for identifiers which contain one or more words meaning the words are concatenated together with no delimiter and the first letter of each word is capitalized.

A time window, with a specifically defined start and end date/time.

A long and often painful conversation had by the FOCUS contributors. Sometimes the name of a thing that we could not yet name. No starchy root vegetables were harmed during the production of this specification. We thank potato for its contribution in the creation of this specification.

An individual who performs FinOps within an organization to maximize the business value of using cloud and cloud-like services.

A comprehensive list of prices offered by a service provider.

A return of funds that have previously been charged.

A unique component that incurs a charge.

A row in a FOCUS-compatible cost and usage dataset.

An entity that provides the resources or services available for usage or purchase.

An offering that can be purchased from a service provider, and can include many types of usage or other charges; e.g., a cloud database service may include compute, storage, and networking charges.

A construct composed of the common properties of a product offering associated with one or many SKU Prices.

A pricing construct that encompasses SKU properties (e.g., functionality and technical specifications), along with core stable pricing details for a particular SKU, while excluding dynamic or negotiable pricing elements such as unit price amounts; currency (and related exchange rates); temporal validity (e.g., effective dates); and contract- or negotiation-specific factors (e.g., contract or account identifiers and negotiable discounts).

A sub account is an optional service-provider-supported construct for organizing resources and/or services connected to a billing account. Sub accounts must be associated with a billing account as they do not receive invoices.

A metadata label assigned to a resource to provide information about it or to categorize it for organizational and management purposes.

A distinct framework for assigning metadata to charges, resources, or other assets. Different metadata types within a single provider (e.g., "tags" vs. "labels") are considered separate schemes. They can be user-defined (i.e., allowing user input) or provider-defined (i.e., controlled by the service provider).

A Resource or Service-Provider-defined construct for grouping resources and/or other Service-Provider-defined construct that a Tag can be assigned to.

An agreement specified on a contract or invoice.

A proprietary currency (e.g., credits, tokens) issued by service providers and independent of government regulation.