Intro to Finout's Budgeting
Using Finout’s budgeting you’ll be able to govern cloud expenditure by aligning IT, finance, and business teams, ensuring efficient resource use while managing and forecasting cloud costs.
Finout’s platform provides cost governance for your entire cloud infrastructure, offering native integrations such as AWS, GCP, Azure, Datadog, Databricks, Kubernetes, and Snowflake.
Using Finout's Virtual Tagging, you can allocate budgets with unparalleled precision; Our hierarchical budgeting feature allows organizations to design budgets mirroring their organizational structure, empowering each stakeholder with the appropriate funds to manage
In addition, you can get real-time budget alerts on Slack, ensuring teams can respond instantly. Finout’s budgeting enables a smooth comparison between your budgeted plans and your actual costs.
Types of Budgeting - Basic and Hierarchical
Basic Budgeting in FinOps is a simplified approach, setting a general budget with limited detail and flexibility, ideal for smaller entities. Hierarchical Budgeting, on the other hand, provides a structured, multi-level budgeting system, allowing detailed resource allocation and expense tracking suitable for larger or more complex organizations.
Learn more about each feature here:
Budget Overview
In the budget overview screen, the budget amount is compared to the forecasted cost, highlighting the difference; the delta:
A green display indicates a surplus.
A red display signifies when the forecasted cost exceeds the budget.
The forecast represents the projected actual cost by the end of the month.
Click on a budget entry to examine and adjust monthly allocations.
2. Click on the values in any of the budget periods to drill down further and view a graph of the budget versus the actual cost, with the forecast projected to month end. In this example, the forecast exceeds the budget around the 21st of the month.
3. To change the budget period, select an option from the drop-down list.
To filter by budget line items, click and select the required values.
Budget Dashboard
The Dashboard offers a comprehensive overview of the budget data for your chosen period and specific budget line items, presenting a visual representation and detailed insights into these budgetary components.
You can view the actual cost versus the budget, and see how your expected budget behaves vs. your actual cost.
Actual Cost - The accumulated actual cost for the selected period and budget line items. Presented as an amount ($) and as a percentage of the actual cost out of the total actual cost of the entire budget for the selected filters.
Budget - The accumulated budget for the selected period and budget line items. Presented as an amount ($) and as a percentage of the budget out of the total budget for the selected filters.
Gap (Delta) - The difference between the Actual Cost and Budget for the selected period and budget line items. This appears in green when there is a surplus, and in red when the actual cost exceeds the budget.
The Budget Dashboard includes four different widgets:
Budget vs. actual by months.
2. Budget vs. actual by values chosen in the filters.
3. Budget values performance displays the actual versus the budgeted amounts, highlighting the difference for each budget line item.
4. Month-over-month actual cost trends showcases the fluctuations in actual costs month-over-month trends during the chosen timeframe.
Budget Forecast
The forecast is the projected actual cost to month end. For the current month, you can view the budget versus the actual cost to date and forecast (projected) cost to month end. The lines intersect if the actual or forecast exceeds the budget.
How to view the Budget Forecast
Select Budgets.
Choose the required budget.
In any of the budget line items, click the required month. In this example, the forecast exceeds the budget towards the end of the month.
4. You can hover over a point in the graph to view the date and forecast, actual cost, or budget.
Deleting a Budget
Select Budgets.
In the required budget, click the three dots and select Remove.
Click Delete. The budget is deleted.
View Budget Alerts
When a budget alert is triggered it appears under your Anomalies.
Navigate to Anomalies in the navigation bar.
To view the budget alerts, from Alert Type, select budget.
To view the MegaBill associated with the budget, click Investigate.
To delete a budget anomaly, click Delete and then click Yes.
To leave a comment on a budget anomaly, click Comment, enter a comment, and then click Save.
For any questions, please feel free to reach out to the Finout team.