Budgets

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.

Basic Budget

The basic budget is the option to create a one-level basic budget by choosing a specific budget level based on a selected time period and group value.

Create a basic budget

1. Navigate to Budgets.

2. Click New budget.

3. Click Basic Budget.

4. Enter a Budget name.

5. Select a time period. This defines the time period you can set the budget for. If you select the current year or quarter, the budget amount is automatically set for all the months in the period.

6. Select the required Budget group option. The total cost of the previous month appears for each of the budgets, assisting you when specifying the budgets. Enter the budget amount per budget group value.

7. (Optional) Select Auto populate budget to populate the budget values with the total cost of the previous month.

8. (Optional) Turn off (or on) to hide (or show) a budget group.

9. The Budget alert is automatically turned on. Should the forecasted cost surpass the set budget, an alert is generated and displayed on the Anomaly page. If necessary, you have the option to deactivate the budget alert.

10. Click Create. The budget is created for the specified period.

Edit a basic budget

1. Select Budgets.

2. Click the required Basic budget.

3. In the required budget line item, click the three dots and select Edit inline.

4. Make the required changes, pressing TAB to jump to the next cell (or SHIFT+TAB to return to the previous cell).

5. Click Save or press Enter.

6. To view the budget on the MegaBill page, click and select Go To MegaBill. This enables you to further investigate the cost of the budget and see more granular data related to the budget.

Hierarchy Budget

The hierarchy budget is used when you want to generate a budget where actual cost, forecasting, and budget set are all aggregations of a lower level in the org chart. For example, a “group” budget is based on aggregations of all teams composing them. Hierarchy budget allows this kind of creation and is completely based on your Virtual tags mappings.

These layers collectively form the overall company-wide budget. This allows role-based budget review and analysis of the different layers of a budget. For example, a specific team leader wants to review the budget for the specific application layer within the company-wide Hierarchy budget.

Important: For the Hierarchy budget level values to match, the cost mapping is based on the virtual tags mappings of the base budget. So only rules that are using the basic budget rules would be used.

1. Select Budgets.

2. Click New budget.

3. Click Hierarchy Budget.

4. Enter a Budget name.

5. Select the required Budget group (Virtual Tags) option- Which Virtual Tags are essential for creating the Hierarchy budget?

6. Select the required Base budget.

   After selecting the relevant budget group and base budget values, a preview will appear, showcasing representative sample data.

   
7. The Budget alert is enabled by default. Should the forecasted cost surpass the set budget, an alert will be generated and displayed on the Anomaly page. If necessary, you have the option to deactivate the budget alert.

8. Click Create.

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:

1. 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 Details

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.

1. 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.

   
4. To filter by budget line items, click and select the required values.

   

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

1. Select Budgets.

2. Choose the required budget.

3. 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

1. Select Budgets.

2. In the required budget, click the three dots and select Remove.

   

   
3. Click Delete. The budget is deleted.

View Budget Alerts

When a budget alert is triggered it appears under your Anomalies.

1. Navigate to Anomalies in the navigation bar.

2. 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 contact the Finout team at [e-mail].