---
title: How to create a cost group
canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/how-to/how-to-create-a-cost-group/"
description: "Set up a cost group so spend can be attributed to a team, product or environment, and understand what happens next."
---

Cost groups are how CloudMonitor maps spend onto your business. Almost everything else — budgets,
chargeback, team reporting, who can see what — hangs off them, so this is the first thing to set up
and the thing worth getting right.

:::note[Admins only]
You need the **Admin** role to do this. Admins are set in Settings ▸ Users & Access. If you don't
see the screens below, ask an admin in your organization.
:::

## Before you start

Decide what a group represents before you create any. The common choices are by team, by product, or
by environment, and mixing them produces a hierarchy nobody can reason about.

A useful test: could you name one person accountable for this group's spend? If not, it's probably
the wrong boundary.

## Step 1 — Open the form

Settings ▸ **Cost Groups** ▸ **New cost group**.

![Step one of the New cost group wizard, showing the Code, Name, Cost center and Colour fields with a two-step indicator](../../../../assets/docs/cost-group-wizard.png)

## Step 2 — Basics

Four fields. Anything marked with a small `*` is required; anything without one is optional, which is
why no label ever says "(optional)".

**Code** — up to 20 characters, yours to define. It does two jobs: matching an identifier from
another system, and routing spend by naming convention. If a reservation or resource name contains
the code wrapped in underscores — `_1024_` — an allocation rule can send it straight to this group
with no retagging. Worth choosing deliberately rather than accepting a number.

**Name** — up to 40 characters, e.g. `Shared Services`. This is what everyone sees.

**Cost center** — optional, up to 40 characters, e.g. `OGD-1024`. Set it if you want groups to roll
up the way your accounting system does. You can pick an existing one or type a new one.

**Colour** — pick a preset or choose your own. It becomes this group's dot everywhere in the app,
so make related groups visually distinct rather than choosing at random.

## Step 3 — Description

Required, up to 500 characters. Write what the group represents, not what it's called — the name
already says that. Six months on, this is what tells someone whether a charge belongs here.

## Step 4 — Create

**Create cost group**.

:::tip[Nothing is saved until this button]
The wizard holds everything in the draft. Move back and forth freely, but leaving before the final
step loses the lot.
:::

## What happens next

**You become the group's Owner automatically.** There's no owner field on the form — whoever creates
a group gets the Owner role on it, and you add others afterwards from
[Manage team](/docs/how-to/how-to-add-owners-and-members-to-a-cost-group/).

**No spend is in it yet.** Creating a group doesn't move any money into it. What lands in a group is
decided by [allocation rules](/docs/how-to/how-to-allocate-costs-with-rules/), which is a separate
step people routinely forget.

**Reports stay empty until the next update.** The group appears in the top-bar filter straight away,
marked **Pending**. Its reports fill in once CloudMonitor next recalculates which costs belong where.
That's expected — nothing is broken.

## Editing one later

Open the group from the list and choose edit. Editing is a single page rather than a wizard, with the
same fields.

Two things you can't change there: **who's on the team** (that's Manage team) and **what spend lands
in it** (that's allocation rules). Both are deliberate — one place to change a thing is how the
places stay in agreement.

## Archiving

Archive from the row's **⋮** menu. It moves to the Archived tab and can be restored any time.

Be aware of the knock-on: any allocation rule pointing at an archived group becomes **Invalid** and
stops applying, so its spend falls through to whatever matches next — usually the Unallocated
catch-all. Repoint or delete those rules rather than leaving them.

The built-in **Unallocated** group can't be archived or deleted at all. Every charge has to land
somewhere.