New: Billed Periods — your invoice and your numbers, side by side

Sooner or later, every FinOps report meets the same question from finance: does this match the invoice?

It’s a fair question, and a surprisingly hard one to answer. Cost tools and invoices are built from the same billing data, but they rarely line up at a glance:

• Invoices follow billing periods that don’t always run by calendar month.
• Some credits are applied only on the invoice, not in the cost data.
• A reservation bought upfront is billed in one month but usually reported as spread across its term.
• One payer invoice often covers accounts nobody asked you to track.

Billed Periods answers the question directly. It’s available today in public preview, as a new tab on Spend.

Invoice against tracked cost, period by period

For every closed billing period, Billed Periods shows what CloudOptify tracked (usage, tax and credits) next to what Azure or AWS actually invoiced, and the difference. Rows are grouped by the month they were billed, per Azure subscription and AWS connection. Expand any row to see the invoices behind it, with invoice numbers ready to copy.

Only real differences

A reconciliation tool is only useful if you can trust its red flags. Billed Periods is careful about when not to compare:

• The current period is shown as in progress, never as a mismatch.
• When an invoice covers more accounts than you track, it’s listed but not compared, because the gap would just be the accounts you left out.
• A credit applied on the invoice, such as the monthly credit on a Visual Studio subscription, is recognised and shown as a credit, not as a discrepancy.
• Reservation and savings-plan purchases count in the month they were billed, exactly as the invoice charges them.

When Billed Periods says a period differs, it’s worth a look.

How exact is each number?

Every row says where its figures come from. Figures from your billing export or Cost & Usage Report are the provider’s own billing data, the same data the invoice is produced from. Figures from the cost APIs are marked as estimates. You always know which numbers you can hand to finance as they are.

Clear about what’s missing

Reading invoices needs one extra read-only billing permission. If a connection doesn’t have it yet, Billed Periods still shows your tracked cost and tells you the exact role or permission to grant, and to which identity. New AWS connections include the permission from the start. Nothing else about your connection changes.

Try it

Billed Periods is in public preview. When your plan includes it, open Spend → Billed periods. The Billed Periods guide explains every status and how to link your invoices. We’d love your feedback on how it matches your month-end process.