FOCUS Standard Offers One Cost Schema for Comparing AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Bills

Teams running workloads across several clouds often rely on custom spreadsheets or scripts to reconcile bills, which break whenever a provider renames a field. The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) is an open billing-data standard that all three major providers can now export in, giving common column names and meanings. The article argues that agreeing on a shared schema should come before dashboards or optimization work, since it lets a single query answer cost questions across clouds. Key columns such as SubAccountId, ServiceName, ChargePeriodStart and Tags help answer where, what, when and who for each charge. Provider-specific extensions are prefixed with x_ and are best kept out of shared queries.