---
title: "\"Start here: cost centre owners\""
canonical: "https://cloudmonitor.ai/docs/using-cloudmonitor/start-here-cost-centre/"
description: "If you are accountable for one team's or project's cloud spend, this is the short path to your slice of CloudMonitor."
---

You're accountable for one slice of the bill — a team, a product, a project. You don't care about the
whole organization's spend, and you shouldn't have to filter it out by hand every time.

Set your view to **Cost centre** (your avatar ▸ Profile & preferences ▸ View). Your home page becomes
the **Project Cost Overview**, leading with your groups' spend, **Budget remaining**,
**Tag coverage** and how much of your spend is ready to charge back.

## First, understand what "yours" means

CloudMonitor slices spend by **cost group** — the business hierarchy your organization set up. Your
slice is the cost groups you belong to.

Two ways you can be attached to one:

- **Member** — you can see the group's costs and triage what's flagged against it.
- **Owner** — all of that, plus editing the group, its budget and its team.

An admin or the group's owner grants that. If you can't see something you expect,
[Roles and access](/docs/reference/roles-and-permissions/) explains why, and who to ask.

## The four things worth learning

**1. Scope everything to your groups.** Set the **Cost group** filter at the top once. It sticks
across every report you open, so you're not re-filtering all day.
See [filtering every report at once](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/global-filters/).

**2. Read your budget.** [Budgets & Forecasts](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/budgets-and-forecasts/)
shows how you're tracking with a month-end projection. Alerts fire on thresholds, and a budget never
caps spend — it tells you, it doesn't stop you.

**3. Explain a number.** When someone questions a charge,
[The Ledger](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/the-ledger/) filtered to your cost group and grouped by
service gets you there in a couple of clicks.
[Working with tables](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/tables-and-charts/) covers the mechanics.

**4. Handle what's flagged at you.**
[Anomalies](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/anomalies/) and
[recommendations](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/savings-and-waste/) attributed to your cost groups
are yours to triage — comment and reassign, postpone, or dismiss with a reason. You don't mark
anomalies complete; CloudMonitor closes them itself once spend returns to normal.

Your own group's full picture — costs, budget, members and history — is on
[inside a cost group](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/reports/inside-a-cost-group/).

## Tag coverage, and why it's on your home page

Spend that no rule matches ends up **Unallocated** — nobody's, which in practice means nobody looks
at it. Tag coverage tells you how much of your slice is properly attributed.

Low coverage isn't a CloudMonitor problem to fix; it's usually a tagging gap in how resources are
created. But you're the person who'll notice, and it's worth raising with whoever runs cloud cost —
it's their job to close.

## Where to look things up

- [Every screen and what it's for](/docs/reference/screen-index/)
- [Effective cost vs billed cost](/docs/using-cloudmonitor/effective-vs-billed-cost/) — worth reading
  before you compare two months
- [Glossary of terms](/docs/reference/glossary/)