Cloud cost visibility and control are mission-critical for modern engineering and IT Finance Management. Yet achieving a true single source of truth remains difficult due to fragmented billing formats across cloud providers, SaaS vendors, and internal systems.
This fragmentation slows analysis, increases errors, and forces FinOps teams to spend more time normalising data than generating insight.
Cloudshot is adopting FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification) as the foundation for delivering standardized, reliable multi-cloud cost intelligence.
What is FOCUS?
FOCUS (FinOps Open Cost & Usage Specification) is an open, vendor-neutral standard that defines a common schema for cost and usage data across cloud and technology providers.
Its goal is simple but powerful: eliminate inconsistency in billing data so teams can analyse, compare, and optimise costs across clouds without complex custom transformations.
FOCUS enables:
A unified view of cost and usage across AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, and beyond
Consistency in meaning and terminology so that cost comparisons, optimization, and reporting are accurate
Simplified analytics workflows with fewer transformations and less engineering overhead
Transferable operational knowledge, so teams don't have to reinvent cost models for each cloud or dataset
In short, FOCUS creates a shared language for cloud cost data
Why FOCUS Matters for Cloudshot Users?
Cloudshot’s mission is to provide clarity and confidence in cloud spend. By adopting FOCUS, we ensure that insights delivered through Cloudshot are standardised, comparable, and future-ready.
True Multi-Cloud Comparability
Standardised columns and definitions allow teams to compare spend and usage across providers without bespoke normalisation logic.
Analytics-Ready Cost Data
FOCUS introduces fields such as effective cost, amortized cost, pricing category, and cost deltas, unlocking deeper analysis is including chargeback, unit economics, and trend analysis.
Easier Integrations
FOCUS-aware tools, dashboards, and pipelines can consume Cloudshot outputs directly, reducing integration friction.
Built for the Future
As FOCUS evolves, Cloudshot will continue to align, ensuring your cost platform grows with FinOps best practices.
Consistent Currency Conversion Across Providers
Multi-cloud cost analysis isn’t just about schema consistency; it also requires currency consistency.
Cloudshot retrieves the billing currency directly from each cloud provider’s bill. When processing costs from multiple providers operating in different currencies, all charges are converted to USD to ensure a unified view of spend.
This conversion uses the average monthly exchange rate, which is updated daily to reflect current market conditions. By applying a consistent and transparent conversion methodology, Cloudshot ensures that cost data remains accurate, comparable, and trustworthy regardless of the original billing currency.
Solving Real IT Finance Management Challenges with FOCUS
Many organizations face recurring FinOps pain points:
Inconsistent billing exports across providers
Long lead times for analytics due to custom data pipelines
Manual reconciliation and spreadsheet-driven analysis
Limited visibility into cost changes and anomalies
With FOCUS alignment, Cloudshot transforms raw billing data into a structured, analysis-ready dataset that supports:
Cost Delta Tracking
Understand how spend changes over time at any granularity
Root Cause Analysis
FOCUS enables precise identification of why costs changed.
Shared Cost Allocation
Standardized tagging and allocation fields make it easier to attribute shared costs accurately.
Cloudshot’s FOCUS Adoption in Practice
Our FOCUS adoption is grounded in real-world implementation, including:
Mapping internal cost models to FOCUS-defined fields
Enhancing ingestion pipelines to support FOCUS datasets
Expanding the Delta Module for richer cost-change insights
Enabling FOCUS-compliant exports in CSV and JSON formats
Aligning UI and reporting terminology with FOCUS standards
This work not only meets today’s needs, but it also lays the foundation for advanced FinOps capabilities tomorrow.
What This Means for You?
With Cloudshot and FOCUS, you get:
Unified Datasets
Data that's standardized and analysis-ready
Clarity and Trust
Cloudshot & FOCUS finops foundation ensures teams can trust that dashboard insights reflect the true cost story across all environments.
Scalability
Whether you run one cloud account or dozens, Cloudshot scales with your environment and your analysis needs.
Industry Alignment
Cloudshot joins other forward-looking vendors adopting FOCUS, ensuring your tooling matches FinOps best practices across the industry.
Moving Forward with Cloudshot + FOCUS
Whether you’re optimizing multi-cloud spend, building chargeback models, or scaling FinOps across your organization, FOCUS provides the standard, and Cloudshot delivers it in practice.
Get started by:
Reviewing the FOCUS Column Library
Exploring Cloudshot’s Delta and Comparative Cost Analysis
Exporting your billing data in FOCUS format
Powering advanced analytics in just a few clicks
Together, Cloudshot and FOCUS help you move faster, reduce friction, and turn cloud cost data into confident decisions.