Cost categories

AvailableReviewed 24 August 2026

Cost categories are how finance actually uses CloudHealth Perspectives: map raw provider cost onto products, teams and shared platforms. CloudHealth also calls this cost reallocation — a source group’s spend redistributed to destination groups.

Use categories together with Cost Explorer and saved views.

Sample organisation using illustrative billing data.

What a category is

A category is a business view (Checkout platform, Data products, Core infrastructure). A rule decides which billed usage belongs there.

CloudHealth	FinomateAI (intended)
Perspective	The lens (Product, Team, Cost centre)
Perspective Group	A category inside that lens
Dynamic group	Tag-driven rule (product = checkout)
Static group	Account or subscription list you maintain
Placeholder group	Shared-split bucket for NAT, egress, logging
Assets not allocated	Unallocated

An asset should sit in one category per lens. The same EC2 instance can be Product=checkout and Environment=production.

Workflow

1. Create a business view (for example Checkout platform).
2. Attach a rule: tag, account, subscription or shared split.
3. Open Unallocated until finance accepts the remainder.
4. Use the same views in reports and budgets so engineering and finance argue about one number.

A rule should name an owner who can change the underlying tags or accounts.

Rule types

Rule	Example	When to use	CloudHealth analogue
Tag	product = checkout	The export already has a stable product tag	Dynamic group on a tag
Account	account = data-products	A whole linked account is one team	Categorize by account
Shared	Split core infrastructure proportionally	NAT, egress, logging that no product owns	Placeholder group + cost reallocation

Tag before you allocate

CloudHealth spends a chapter on tagging because Perspectives fail without it. The same is true here.

Recommended keys (use these exact spellings):

Key	Example values
environment	production, staging, development
product	checkout, search, data-platform
owner	team or IAM-style owner
cost-center	internal finance code

Do this in AWS tags, Azure tags and Google Cloud labels — not only in FinomateAI. The bill is the source of truth.

Unallocated spend

Unallocated is a finding, not a rounding error. It usually means missing tags — see Compliance.

Fix tags or add a shared-split rule; do not hide the remainder.

Chargeback

Once unallocated is within the remainder finance will accept, use the same categories in reports and budgets. That is the CloudHealth cost-reallocation workflow.

Related guides

• Saved views
• Compared with CloudHealth
• Compliance