Aligning Cloud Costs with the General Ledger for Accurate Financial Analysis

This article discusses the challenges of aligning cloud costs with a company's general ledger (GL) for accurate financial reporting and budget management. It focuses on three potential factors that can cause variances between AWS Cost and Usage Reports (CUR) data and the GL:

Specifically, the article covers:

• Corporate closing calendar and the timing of posting monthly cloud cost entries
• Accounting policies and amortization schedules for commitment-based purchases like AWS Savings Plans and Reserved Instances
• AWS Marketplace purchases or AWS Support fees after commitment-based purchases
• Separating cloud cost drivers from financial process drivers in monthly variance analysis to focus on actual cloud consumption trends