FOCUS
FOCUS, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, is the FinOps Foundation’s open schema for cloud billing data. It defines one set of columns with one meaning across providers, covering billed and effective cost, service and charge categories, resource, account and commitment identifiers, so that AWS, Azure and Google Cloud exports can be read as one dataset.
Before FOCUS every organization built its own translation layer. AWS accounts, Azure subscriptions and Google Cloud projects are the same concept under three names; discounts are applied at different levels; the same resource is priced in different units; each export has its own schema. FOCUS names the common concepts once, and all three major providers now publish exports in the format alongside their native ones.
FOCUS solves the vocabulary problem. It does not solve allocation: a FOCUS row still has to be mapped to a department, a product or a customer, and shared costs still need a driver. What it removes is the hand-built normalization, and it makes a multi-cloud ledger something a new tool, a new analyst or an auditor can read without a glossary.
The specification has grown through releases. The original columns cover accounts, periods, charges, the four cost views, pricing, usage, service, resource, location, SKU and commitment discounts; later releases added subcategories, capacity reservations, pricing-currency columns, invoice identifiers and provider-calculated allocation. Runcost’s contract follows FOCUS 1.4, and the columns reference on this site documents every column as the platform ingests it.
For a finance reader the practical value is that “effective cost” and “billed cost” mean the same thing on every cloud, so an amortized view and a cash view can be produced for the whole estate from one ledger.
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