"Start here: finance and leadership"
You need a number you can take into a meeting, and a straight answer when someone asks whether it’s going up. You do not need to know what a resource group is.
Set your view to Leadership (your avatar ▸ Profile & preferences ▸ View). Your home page becomes the Executive Overview, leading with spend, forecast, Realised savings YTD and Budget variance. CloudMonitor also opens on AI tool adoption rather than the operational overview, on the assumption that’s the question you arrived with.
The three-minute version
Section titled “The three-minute version”- Your Overview — spend, forecast, budget position, savings realized. If you only ever open one screen, this is it.
- Budgets & Forecasts — how each budget is tracking, with a month-end projection.
- Savings & Waste — what’s being left on the table, ranked by value.
Two things worth setting up front:
- The Period at the top drives every figure. Financial-year presets follow your organization’s financial year, not the calendar. See filtering every report at once.
- Cost basis decides whether a prepaid year lands in one month or spreads across twelve. For comparing teams or months, you want effective cost — the default. See effective cost vs billed cost, which is worth five minutes before you quote a figure to anyone.
Questions you’ll be asked, and where they’re answered
Section titled “Questions you’ll be asked, and where they’re answered”| The question | The screen |
|---|---|
| What did we spend, and is it going up? | Your Overview |
| Are we going to blow the budget? | Budgets & Forecasts |
| Which part of the business does this belong to? | The Cost Groups report |
| What are we doing about it? | Savings & Waste |
| What is AI actually costing us? | AI Spend, if your organization has that module |
Every screen and what it’s for lists the rest.
A caveat worth carrying
Section titled “A caveat worth carrying”Some figures are estimates rather than invoiced amounts — projected savings in particular are modeled, not money that has moved. Each screen’s ⓘ says which it is. It’s worth checking before a number goes in a board pack.
Getting a number you can trust
Section titled “Getting a number you can trust”If a figure looks wrong, it’s almost always the Period or the cost basis. Check those two before escalating; between them they explain most surprises.
If you want the detail behind a number, hand the question to whoever runs cloud cost day to day and point them at Start here: FinOps and IT.