With the introduction of these new purchase-related enhancements, some customers may notice sudden cost spikes on certain days. This occurs because the monthly amount for reservations or savings plans might be reflected on a single day within your cost reports, resulting in what appears to be a spike. There’s no need to be concerned, this is simply due to the improved visibility of detailed purchase-related billing information. It does not indicate unexpected charges, but rather provides greater clarity on exactly when and how your reservations and savings plans are billed and recorded in Azure Cost Management.
Cloud financial managers analyzing Azure Cost Management data. Azure Cost Management now provides richer purchase-related information for organizations under the Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA). Several new features are generally available that enhance the level of detail and accuracy in cost data for reservations (RIs), Azure Savings Plans (ASPs), and third-party Azure Marketplace purchases. These improvements empower FinOps teams with better insights for showback, chargeback, and optimization of cloud spending.
Billing Subscription ID for RI and Savings Plan Purchases
One of the key enhancements is that the billing subscription ID is now displayed for reservation (RI) and savings plan (ASP) purchases. In practice, this means cost reports explicitly list which Azure subscription was charged for each RI or savings plan purchase. This makes it much easier to identify the “owner” of a commitment, aiding in accurate showback and chargeback to the correct project or business unit. For those using the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) exports, this subscription identifier appears in the SubAccountId (Subscription ID) field of the exported dataset.
Clear Service Term Start and End Dates
Azure Cost Management data now includes ServiceStart and ServiceEnd fields (represented as servicePeriodStartDate and servicePeriodEndDate) that clearly reflect the term of the offer purchased. These fields indicate the start and end dates of the commitment period for your reservation or savings plan, providing better clarity on the duration of your commitments. For example, if you purchased a 1-year reserved instance, you will see the exact start and end date of that one-year term in your cost details. In FOCUS exports, these dates are available in the x_ServicePeriodStart and x_ServicePeriodEnd columns. This helps FinOps teams track when a reservation or plan term begins and expires, which is useful for renewal planning and understanding coverage periods.
Pay-as-You-Go Cost Comparison Fields
To help quantify savings, Reservation and Savings Plan purchase records now populate the pay-as-you-go cost fields. The paygCostInBillingCurrency and paygCostInUSD fields will show what the cost would have been at retail Pay-As-You-Go rates in your billing currency and in USD, respectively. In other words, these fields provide the list-price cost of the resources covered by the RI or ASP, allowing you to compare it against what you actually paid for the commitment. This gives a clear picture of your savings achieved by purchasing the RI or Savings Plan. According to Microsoft’s definitions, paygCostInBillingCurrency represents the hypothetical cost before tax at pay-as-you-go rates in your billing currency, and paygCostInUSD is the same metric in USD.
From a FinOps perspective, having these retail reference costs in the data makes it straightforward to calculate savings percentages and demonstrate the value of commitments. If you’re using FOCUS exports, note that the ListCost (retail cost) in billing currency was already included, and with this update you’ll now see values in the x_ListCostInUsd column as well. This means you have both local currency and USD retail cost for each RI/ASP purchase in the FOCUS dataset, which is useful for global reporting or normalization.
Monthly Billing Plan Installment Details
For customers who choose monthly billing plans for their commitment-based offers, Azure Cost Management now provides more complete information on each installment. Specifically, the pricingCurrency and costInPricingCurrency fields will now display values for all installments of a monthly billed reservation or savings plan. This ensures you have a full view of your billing details over the life of a commitment when you pay in periodic installments.
In practical terms, if you opted to spread payment of an RI or ASP over, say, 12 monthly bills, each monthly charge entry will include the pricing currency and the cost in that pricing currency. The pricing currency is the currency in which the offer’s price is defined (which for many customers might be USD or another standard currency), as opposed to your billing currency. The costInPricingCurrency shows the installment amount in that pricing currency, and you can also see the cost in your billing currency (costInBillingCurrency) as usual. This transparency is helpful for finance teams to reconcile amounts especially if exchange rates or currency conversions are involved in billing. (For FOCUS exports users, all costs in the FOCUS dataset are already in the billing currency by design, so the main applicable field here is the x_PricingCurrency column, which will reflect the currency of the offer’s price for each installment.)
Enhanced Azure Marketplace Purchase Details (Tags & Resource Info)
Another major improvement is the enriched data for third-party Azure Marketplace purchases made through the Azure portal. Previously, costs for marketplace items (like software subscriptions or SaaS offers from third-party vendors) had limited metadata, making it hard to attribute those costs. Now, Cost Management will include additional context for marketplace purchases, including tags, resource ID, subscription ID, and resource group name for purchases completed via the Azure portal.
What does this mean? If you purchase a third-party solution through Azure Marketplace, you can tag that purchase (for example, assign it an environment or cost center tag), and those tags will appear in your cost data for that item. Additionally, the cost record will show a ResourceId (the Azure Resource Manager resource identifier associated with the purchase, if applicable), the derived SubscriptionId of the subscription that initiated the purchase, and a ResourceGroupName if the purchase is tied to a resource group (for instance, some marketplace resources deploy into a resource group). This extra information makes it much easier to do showback/chargeback for marketplace costs, since you can see which subscription or project is responsible and use tags to allocate the expense internally.
Note: These fields are supported for marketplace purchases made through the Azure portal. Purchases from other marketplace storefronts (like AppSource or other channels) might not populate this metadata. In FOCUS exports, you will find the marketplace purchase details in the following columns: Tags (for any tags applied), ResourceId, SubAccountId (which contains the subscription ID), and x_ResourceGroupName. With these fields now available, FinOps teams can incorporate marketplace expenses into their existing tagging strategies and resource-based cost analysis, increasing the accuracy of their cost allocation.
Effective Price Now Visible in Pricing Currency
Azure Cost Management now displays the effective price for purchases, which provides a consistent view of price points in the pricing currency across all your purchase records. The effective price is essentially the actual rate you end up paying per unit of the service or resource, after any discounts or amortization of a commitment. In other words, it’s the “real” unit cost that you are paying as part of the deal. This metric is valuable for understanding and benchmarking costs: for example, you can compare the effective per-hour rate of a VM under a reserved instance to the pay-as-you-go rate, or compare effective licensing costs for a third-party software subscription to its list price.
To clarify, EffectivePrice in Azure’s cost data is defined as the price per unit that you actually pay, reflecting any negotiated discounts off the retail rate. With this update, those effective per-unit prices are now readily visible for all purchases in the currency the offer is priced in (the pricing currency). In the cost details file, you’ll see fields for the billed unit price and effective unit price for each purchase. If you use FOCUS exports, these values correspond to the x_BilledUnitPrice, x_EffectiveUnitPrice, and ContractedUnitPrice columns. Having the effective unit prices in the data allows for more precise unit economics calculations and cost modeling. For instance, a FinOps practitioner can now easily pull the effective rate of a reserved instance or savings plan per unit and use that in cost forecasting or chargeback formulas.
Subscription-Level Visibility for CSP Purchases and Refunds
For organizations that purchase Azure through a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) partner, there is a notable enhancement as well: purchases and refunds are now visible at the subscription scope for CSP customers. In the past, if you were a customer under a CSP, you might not have seen reservation or savings plan purchases in your subscription’s cost data – those could have been visible only to the CSP at the billing level. Now, Azure Cost Management surfaces those purchase and refund records directly in the subscription’s cost details. This change offers greater transparency and control over spending for the end customers of CSPs. You can monitor and validate any RI or ASP purchases and refunds that a CSP partner makes on your behalf, right from your subscription view, just as if you were a direct MCA customer.
If you use Cost Management exports at the subscription scope (including FOCUS exports), you will now see these CSP purchase and refund line items included in the data for the relevant subscription. This improved visibility helps FinOps and IT teams in CSP scenarios to get a complete picture of their costs and commitments without having to rely solely on external reports from the partner.
Implications for FinOps and Reporting
All these enhancements in Azure Cost Management’s data model translate to more actionable information for FinOps practitioners and IT finance teams. FOCUS export users in particular should note the specific columns where the new data can be found, as summarized below:
- Reservation/Savings Plan Purchase Owner – The billing subscription ID of RI/ASP purchases is now included. (FOCUS column: SubAccountId for the subscription ID.)
- Commitment Term Dates – Start and end dates of the service period are provided (the term of the offer). (FOCUS columns: x_ServicePeriodStart, x_ServicePeriodEnd.)
- Retail Cost Comparison – Pay-as-You-Go cost in billing currency and USD are populated for RI/ASP purchases. (FOCUS columns: ListCost (billing currency) and x_ListCostInUsd.)
- Monthly Plan Pricing – Installment pricing currency is shown for monthly payment plans. (FOCUS column: x_PricingCurrency.)
- Marketplace Purchase Details – Tags, resource ID, subscription ID, and resource group for Azure Marketplace purchases via portal are now available. (FOCUS columns: Tags, ResourceId, SubAccountId (subscription), x_ResourceGroupName.)
- Effective Unit Price – The effective per-unit purchase price is visible in pricing currency. (FOCUS columns: x_BilledUnitPrice, x_EffectiveUnitPrice, ContractedUnitPrice.)
When using Azure Cost Management’s Cost Details or exporting data for analysis, you’ll find these values in the corresponding fields/columns as noted. This means less guesswork or manual tracking for things like which team’s subscription made a purchase, how long a reservation lasts, or how much a commitment is saving you versus pay-as-you-go rates. FinOps teams can incorporate this data into their dashboards and reports (for example, to show savings achieved, to allocate reservation costs to business units, or to flag upcoming reservation expirations using the service period end date).
Conclusion
In summary, the latest enhancements to Azure Cost Management for MCA customers deliver much-needed transparency and granularity for purchase-related costs. Billing subscription identifiers, service term dates, pay-as-you-go cost references, pricing currency details for monthly plans, enriched marketplace purchase metadata, effective unit pricing, and CSP subscription-level visibility all combine to provide a more complete picture of your cloud spending. These features are now generally available and can be leveraged immediately in Cost Management reports and exports.
By taking advantage of these improvements, organizations can streamline their cloud financial management processes – from more precise chargeback reports to better-informed optimization decisions. FinOps and IT teams should update any internal cost reporting or FOCUS export processing to make use of the new fields. With more detailed purchase information at hand, managing and optimizing Azure costs under the Microsoft Customer Agreement becomes an even more efficient and data-driven endeavor.
Sources: Microsoft Azure Cost Management documentation and FinOps blog announcements
