Budgets are a part of PyraCloud’s end-to-end Spend Management. It allows you to assign individual budgets in two areas:
- Custom Groups reflecting your business
- Per Service Provider
Customer Centric Budgeting
This area of Budgets allows you to assign individual Budgets to Custom Groups defined within Custom Groups (CG). This allows you to manage time periods and monetary values for your Spend defined by your business.
Service Provider Centric Budgeting
This area of Budgets allows you to assign individual budgets to Enrollments, Subscriptions or Tenants (depending on the Provider terms). This allows you to manage time periods and monetary values for your spend tied to your Providers.
Before You Start
Customer Centric View
In order to assign budgets to individual groups, it is required to setup the structure in Custom Groups first. Without the setup of Custom Groups, you will only be able to see the “Per Provider” view in Budget Manager.
Currency in Custom Group Budgets
One of the first steps is to set up a currency. This is required to allow you to use your internal reporting currency across all Custom Groups, and manage the budgets and consumption in your individual currency. This is done for the following reasons:
- If you are using multiple Providers in different sourcing currencies, PyraCloud will convert them to your set currency to harmonize the use for your convenience
- The configured currency is also the default currency within Consumption Overview (native sourcing currency available any time)
- Consumption values are converted on a daily basis based on the Foreign Exchange rates
Following these settings will ensure a more intuitive use of Budgets and utilization charts.
NOTE: The currency can only be changed before configuring the first Budget. Changing currencies later will require the removal of all Budgets.
Currency in the Per Provider View
The “Per Provider” view is always shown in the native sourcing currency and allows you to prepare your engagement with the Provider. Amounts and utilization are not converted and are available any time within Budgets, or for further reporting through Consumption Overview.
Accessing Budgets
You can navigate to Budgets through the main navigation menu by clicking on Manage and selecting Budgets from the dropdown.
If you are the first user to use Budgets within your organization, you will find an empty Budget page with the request to “Setup First Reporting Period”
Custom Group Budgets
Creating Reporting Periods
Reporting Periods represent time periods that you use to schedule budgets in your organization. These can be for example: financial year, calendar year, quarters or any custom time period.
Each Reporting Period is treated as an overall budget for all Custom Groups. Thus it carries information like Budget Amount or Budget Owner.
When creating the first Reporting Period, you will be asked to select a currency that will be applied to every Custom Group budget.
Creating Custom Group Budgets
Once you have adjusted your currency, the next step is to actually define the budgets. You can assign a budget to any custom group defined earlier within the Custom Groups (CG). The tree is available when clicking on “+ Add Budget”.
This will take you to the budget creation page:
You must provide the following information to create a budget:
- Total Amount: Value that you have budgeted to spend on this group
- Owner Email Address: Address of the person that owns the budget and will receive utilization notifications
Save the new budget to see it on the list:
Creating Child Budgets
You can create child budgets by selecting a child group. The child budget amount must be less or equal to the budget amount that is available for allocation in the parent budget.
Budget Details
Click on “View” in the budget list of your selected budget to view more details.
This page will provide you the following details on your budget:
- Current Budget Spend – spend generated by resources assigned to the budget group within the budget time period
- Predicted Spend – prediction calculated until the end of the budget period
- Budget Time Remaining – days left until the end of the budget period
- Budget Time Period – start and end date of the budget
- Budget Owner – email address of a person responsible for this budget
- Budget Utilization Chart – monthly budget amount compared to monthly consumption
Monthly Budget Breakdown
By default the budget amount will be equally distributed across budget months. Based on that, the table will provide you with consumption and utilization information for every month.
You can edit the monthly budgets to adjust the budget amount for every month.
Child Budgets
This tab provides information about child budget amounts and utilization. Consumption in child budgets is included in the parent budget utilization value.
You can edit the child budget amounts by selecting “Edit Budgets”.
Top 50 Resources
This tab shows the top consuming resources of the displayed budget. You can expand a resource to view more details.
Select “View in Resource Manager” to open resource details in Resource Manager.
Select “View Consumption” to open resource spend analytics.
Per Provider Budgets
Click on the “Per Provider” tab to open and manage budgets for your accounts.
Creating Per Provider Budgets
Click on the “Add Budget” action to create a new budget. Depending on the Provider, the budget can be created for an Account and a Subscription.
You will be taken to the new budget creation form. Provide budget amount and email address of the person responsible to create the budget.
If you create a budget for an Account – you will be asked to provide a budget name. In the case of subscription budgets, the name is automatically set to the subscription name.
NOTE: There can be only one Subscription budget created under an Account budget.
Budget Details
To view more details, select a budget from the list and click on “View”.
The scope of the information is similar to the Custom Group Budget details page.
If you are displaying an Account budget details, the chart values are split by the account subscriptions.
Subscriptions
The list of subscriptions is provided in the “Subscriptions” tab with consumption and prediction details.
You can add and edit budget for a selected subscription by clicking on “Edit Budgets” or “Add”.
Top 50 Resources
Click on the “Top 50 Resources” tab to see a list of the top resources consuming the most for that budget (Account or Subscription).
You can expand selected resource to view more details and navigate to the Resource page, or the Consumption Details page in Consumption Overview.
Requesting Budget Creation And Change
The list of budgets is displayed for you according to your Spend Management access configuration. It means you can have limited visibility to Custom Groups or Providers. Access rights are defined by your Site Administrator.
In the case of limited access, you cannot manage budgets of the top level Custom Groups (Custom Group view) or Subscriptions (Per Provider view). In this case you will see the Budget request functionality.
Requesting a New Budget
You will see the following option when you request a new Budget (available both for Custom Group and Per Provider Budgets):
If you choose this option, the Budget Request form will be displayed:
Fill in required Budget amount and confirm the request. The Budget Owner of the parent Custom Group will receieve your request and will be able to create the Budget for you.
Requesting Budget Change
Similarly to new Budget requests, you can request for a change to be made to Budgets that you cannot modify yourself. Choose the “Request Budget Change” option to create your request:
Provide the amout you request and submit your request. The Budget Owner of the parent Budget will receieve your request.
Budget Creation And Change Notifications
When a Budget is created or changed and the person performing that action is not the Budget Owner specified for the modified Budget, the Budget Owner receives notification every time the following event occurs:
- New Budget is created
- Budget amount changed
- Budget name changed
- Budget start sate or end date changed
- Budget Owner changed
Budget Utilization Alerts
Both Custom Group and Per Provider Budgets offer utilization alerts.
You can set three thresholds that will trigger notifications for particular Budget Owners. These values are initially set by default, but you can adjust the percentage values by clicking on Edit as shown below:
NOTE: Alert settings are individual for Custom Group and Per Provider budgets.
Click on “Manage Notifications” to edit notification settings in Notification Hub Manager. You can select which notifications you want to receive (across all budgets) and how these notifications should be delivered.
Cost Models
If you have purchased any Reserved Instances, you can choose between two Cost Models:
- Actual Cost – represents Reserved Instance purchase cost as a one-time cost (single spend record)
- Amortized Cost – equally distributes Reserved Instance purchase cost across months of the reservation time period
NOTE: Setting the Cost Model in Budgets will set the selected model as your default in other PyraCloud features (Consumption Overview and Chargeback Manager).