FOCUS vs Custom Solutions for Billing Data

Managing cloud costs across multiple providers can be a nightmare for UK organisations. Each provider - AWS, Azure, Google Cloud - uses different billing formats, making it difficult to consolidate costs, allocate expenses, or reconcile invoices. This lack of consistency slows decision-making and creates inefficiencies, especially when dealing with multi-cloud environments.

To solve this, you have two main options: FOCUS, an open standard for billing data, or Custom Solutions, tailored pipelines built in-house. Here's the key difference: FOCUS simplifies multi-cloud cost management with a standardised schema, while custom solutions offer flexibility for unique business needs but require more effort to maintain.

Key Takeaways:

• FOCUS: Standard schema for billing data across providers; easier setup and maintenance; ideal for multi-cloud environments and GBP-based reporting.
• Custom Solutions: Fully tailored to specific needs; supports hybrid or on-premise costs; higher maintenance burden and engineering requirements.
• Hybrid Approach: Combine FOCUS with custom layers for added flexibility without losing standardisation.

For UK businesses, FOCUS is great for streamlining cloud cost reporting, while custom solutions work better for complex or niche requirements. Choosing the right path depends on your organisation’s size, cloud usage, and technical resources.

FOCUS on your Cloud Cost and Usage! - FinOps Foundation Open Billing Standard for Cloud Providers!

Understanding the FOCUS Standard

The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) brings consistency to billing data by standardising it into a single format across cloud providers. Instead of juggling separate billing schemas for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others, FOCUS establishes a universal set of field names that work across platforms. This means you can use the same queries, dashboards, or reports for any provider without needing adjustments - making multi-cloud cost management much easier. This unified approach lays the groundwork for smoother integrations and reliable reporting, as explored below.

How FOCUS Works

FOCUS is a data standard that organises billing information into logically grouped columns. Each row represents a charge line item, detailing who incurred the cost, what was consumed, how it was priced, when it happened, and how it should be allocated. Key fields include charge type, pricing model, provider and account identifiers, service and resource metadata, pricing metrics, and normalised currencies. This structure enables seamless cross-cloud queries.

Cloud providers' native billing fields are mapped into FOCUS fields either directly by the provider or through ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines. Once the data is mapped, it can be queried in a consistent way, no matter which provider it comes from. This makes unified multi-cloud cost analysis not just possible but straightforward.

Adoption and Implementation

Major cloud providers have embraced FOCUS, recognising the benefits for both customers and the wider cloud ecosystem. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud now offer - or are in the process of rolling out - FOCUS-compatible billing exports. Oracle Cloud and others are also joining in. This native support shifts the burden of normalising billing data from customers to the providers themselves.

AWS recently made Data Exports for FOCUS 1.2 widely available, adding 14 new columns compared to FOCUS 1.0. These additions include fields for invoice reconciliation, reservation and capacity analytics, and detailed pricing information, making it a reliable source for financial reporting.

Typically, teams enable native FOCUS exports through their cloud provider's billing console and then ingest the data into a central platform like a data warehouse or data lake for analysis. For providers or SaaS vendors that don’t yet offer native FOCUS data, organisations often create ETL transformations to map existing billing schemas into the FOCUS format. Tools like Datadog Cloud Cost Management automate this process by mapping provider-specific fields to the FOCUS structure, allowing users to analyse multi-cloud and SaaS costs as a unified dataset. Some platforms even let users upload custom FOCUS-formatted data for non-standard vendors.

Organisations often enrich raw FOCUS data to reflect their internal financial structures. This might involve correcting inconsistent cloud tags, mapping technical tags to business units or cost centres, labelling environments (like production or staging), or adding internal chargeback keys. While some third-party platforms maintain this enrichment as their source of truth, others join it with FOCUS data during ETL or reporting.

Benefits for UK Organisations

As FOCUS adoption grows, UK organisations are seeing additional advantages. By resolving inconsistencies in billing data, FOCUS supports accurate GBP reporting and compliance. One key benefit is a reduction in reconciliation effort - teams no longer need to maintain separate logic for each provider’s billing format, which reduces errors in reporting and budgeting.

With a single schema, organisations can create standardised reports that compare workloads across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This transparency is invaluable for leadership, helping inform decisions about cloud strategy, vendor negotiations, and workload placement. It also simplifies regulatory and audit processes, as auditors can work with a consistent data structure.

The virtual currency features in FOCUS 1.2 are especially helpful for UK organisations managing workloads billed in different currencies like USD or EUR. By providing normalised values using defined exchange mechanisms, FOCUS enables consistent aggregation of costs across currencies and regions. Teams can then apply their own finance-approved exchange rates to convert all charges into GBP, ensuring compliance with UK accounting standards and internal financial controls.

FOCUS also improves data quality and governance by standardising definitions for costs, discounts, taxes, and usage across providers. This consistency supports robust internal controls and enables automated anomaly detection, budget alerts, and cost-saving recommendations.

For organisations with complex UK-specific needs - like VAT handling, jurisdiction-specific compliance, or detailed cost centre allocations - FOCUS provides a reliable foundation. Teams can build on this standardised base with custom business logic, reducing development time and maintenance.

Specialist partners like Hokstad Consulting can help UK organisations implement FOCUS by designing data models, building ETL pipelines, and integrating FOCUS exports into existing workflows. By aligning FOCUS with broader initiatives like cloud cost management and automation, these partnerships ensure that standardised billing data directly supports cost reduction, faster delivery cycles, and accurate GBP reporting.

The FinOps Foundation calls FOCUS the unifying format for cloud bills, and for UK organisations grappling with multi-cloud cost visibility, this standardisation offers a practical way forward. With native provider support, open-source tools, and a growing ecosystem, FOCUS turns the goal of unified billing into a reality.

Custom Solutions: Flexibility and Challenges

Before the introduction of FOCUS, organisations often built billing pipelines from scratch to maintain full control over cost tracking, allocation, and reporting. While custom solutions allow for tailoring to unique business needs, they also come with hefty technical demands and ongoing maintenance challenges. Let’s break down the components and hurdles of creating these bespoke systems.

Components of Custom Solutions

A custom billing pipeline is essentially a collection of interconnected processes that transform raw cloud data into meaningful insights. These solutions align well with multi-cloud strategies, offering the ability to adapt to specific requirements. The process typically starts with extracting billing data from native cloud exports like AWS Cost and Usage Reports, Azure Cost Management exports, and GCP billing exports. Each provider uses its own billing format, adding complexity.

The next step involves the ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) workflow, which is handled through ETL tools or custom scripts. This stage pulls raw billing data, converts it into a unified internal format, and loads it into a central repository. During this transformation, provider-specific fields are mapped to an internal schema, currencies are converted to GBP using daily rates, cost centre codes are applied, and records are tagged by business unit and environment.

The transformed data is then stored in a data warehouse - platforms like Snowflake, BigQuery, or Azure Synapse are common choices. Unlike FOCUS, which offers a standardised structure, a custom solution allows you to design a schema that matches your organisation's specific cost management needs. For example, you might include fields for internal project codes, department hierarchies, or environment types that are unique to your business.

This setup enables precise reporting and analysis. Finance teams, engineers, and executives can query the data to monitor spending, manage budgets, and identify cost-saving opportunities. For instance, a UK-based SaaS company might create scripts to normalise costs from AWS and Azure, convert them into GBP, and tag records by environment. The result? A data model and reporting logic entirely tailored to their needs.

Challenges of Custom Solutions

The flexibility of custom solutions often comes with a steep price. One of the most persistent issues is schema drift. Cloud providers regularly update their billing exports by adding, removing, or renaming fields. These changes can disrupt ETL workflows and dashboards, leaving teams scrambling to fix broken pipelines. For instance, UK finance teams might face delays in monthly reconciliation when AWS unexpectedly modifies its report structure.

Constantly evolving pricing models add another layer of complexity. New instance types, discount programmes, and pricing tiers appear frequently. Each update requires manual adjustments to cost calculations and allocation logic. If Azure introduces a new savings plan or AWS rolls out a new EC2 family, your pipeline must be updated to handle the changes accurately.

Maintaining these pipelines typically requires dedicated data engineers or FinOps specialists. These professionals often spend several days each month addressing schema changes, fixing pipeline errors, and updating pricing logic. This is time that could be spent on more strategic tasks like cost optimisation.

For UK organisations, additional challenges include managing daily exchange rates, applying VAT correctly, and aligning with local financial reporting standards. Errors in these areas - such as applying the wrong exchange rate or missing VAT charges - can lead to inaccuracies in financial statements, which can become significant issues during audits or regulatory reviews.

Data quality and governance are also major hurdles. Manual corrections, such as fixing inconsistent cloud tags or updating cost allocation rules, often end up in spreadsheets, creating fragmented data sources. Without rigorous validation checks, errors like missing fields or duplicate records can creep into financial reports, leading to misaligned budgets and audit challenges.

The FinOps Foundation highlights that many organisations struggle with pre-existing billing data normalisation issues across multiple technology providers, with teams dedicating countless hours to manual reconciliation across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and others.

When Custom Solutions Work Well

Despite these challenges, custom solutions can deliver immense value in specific scenarios. For example, a UK-based media company managing a mix of cloud workloads, on-premises rendering farms, and third-party SaaS tools might need a custom pipeline to consolidate all costs into a single GBP-based view for board-level reporting. Since FOCUS doesn’t handle non-cloud sources, custom logic becomes essential for comprehensive cost visibility.

Organisations with complex internal chargeback models also benefit from custom solutions. If you allocate shared infrastructure costs based on usage metrics, headcount, or revenue, a bespoke pipeline can implement the exact logic you need.

Integration with existing systems is another area where custom solutions excel. Feeding cloud costs into ERP systems, ITSM platforms, or custom financial applications often requires precise control over data formats and API integrations. Custom pipelines let you tailor outputs to match the requirements of downstream systems.

Finally, non-cloud data sources highlight the strengths of custom solutions. If your organisation manages colocation costs, legacy systems, or specialised hardware, a custom pipeline can ingest data from invoices, CSV exports, and other structured formats. This allows you to create a unified cost model that combines cloud, SaaS, and on-premises expenses.

The success of custom solutions hinges on having a strong in-house data engineering team. These experts are essential for building reliable pipelines, implementing monitoring and alerting systems, maintaining documentation, and regularly assessing the solution’s effectiveness. Without this expertise, the maintenance burden can quickly outweigh the benefits.

Specialist firms like Hokstad Consulting can be invaluable in this process. They help UK organisations design efficient billing pipelines that align with local financial practices, including GBP conversion, VAT handling, and fiscal calendar alignment. By focusing on resilience and scalability, they aim to reduce long-term maintenance demands while ensuring the solution meets the organisation’s unique needs.

FOCUS vs Custom Solutions: A Comparison

FOCUS and custom solutions each bring their own advantages and challenges, depending on factors like organisation size, technical expertise, and cloud usage. Let’s dive into how these two options stack up for UK businesses.

Standardisation and Multi-Cloud Fit

FOCUS offers a standardised schema that simplifies billing data across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and various SaaS providers. This means your FinOps team can analyse costs for Kubernetes clusters or other resources using the same dimensions, without worrying about provider-specific tags or categories. For example, you can compare costs like £ per vCPU-hour or £ per GB-month consistently across providers - ideal for businesses balancing workloads across multiple clouds for resilience or compliance with data residency rules.

On the other hand, custom solutions give you full control over how data is structured. However, this comes with a trade-off: you’ll need to define and maintain field names, charge categories, tax handling, and allocation logic for each provider. Plus, as providers update their billing formats, your team must constantly revise these mappings. This approach can handle diverse environments, from public clouds to on-premises hardware, but it requires significant effort and expertise.

Implementation Effort and Maintenance

FOCUS implementations are relatively straightforward. The process involves enabling billing exports from cloud providers, linking them to your data platform, and configuring ingestion jobs. For a mid-sized UK organisation with existing FinOps practices, this setup typically takes a few weeks. The predefined schema reduces the need for extensive design work, allowing teams to focus on aligning FOCUS fields with reporting needs.

In contrast, building a custom solution is a much larger undertaking. You’ll need to define a schema, map each provider’s raw billing data, and build transformation pipelines. Handling edge cases like refunds, tax conversions, and governance processes adds complexity. Collaboration between data engineers, FinOps teams, and finance stakeholders can stretch this process over several months, leading to higher costs and longer reporting delays.

When it comes to maintenance, FOCUS significantly reduces the burden. Schema updates are managed by the FinOps Foundation and cloud providers, so your team only needs to validate and adopt new fields as they’re introduced. For instance, when FOCUS 1.2 added 14 new fields for improved invoice reconciliation and reservation reporting, providers like AWS updated their exports automatically. Your team’s focus shifts to monitoring export jobs, managing storage, and ensuring security.

Custom solutions, however, place the entire maintenance load on your team. You must track every change in provider billing formats, update ETL pipelines, and revise documentation. This constant effort increases the risk of delays, leading to broken pipelines or missing data - problems that can disrupt month-end reporting.

For UK organisations with limited data engineering resources, these differences can be critical. Specialist consultancies like Hokstad Consulting can assist with either approach, whether by setting up FOCUS exports or designing custom pipelines tailored to UK requirements, such as GBP conversions and VAT handling.

Data Quality and Governance

FOCUS enforces consistent definitions for charge categories, pricing models, and usage metrics. Developed by an industry working group, the schema addresses common FinOps needs like spend allocation and invoice reconciliation. Once calculations like blended rates or amortised commitment costs are defined, they can be applied uniformly across all providers. This consistency reduces discrepancies in management reports and ensures clarity for UK financial stakeholders.

Custom schemas, while flexible, can lead to challenges without strict governance. Over time, duplicated or poorly documented fields and inconsistent logic can erode trust in cost data. This can complicate audits or regulatory queries - especially in sectors like financial services, where cost allocation must meet strict standards.

FOCUS 1.2 introduced several enhancements, including 14 new fields to improve reporting on shared costs, capacity reservations, and commitment discounts. Features like virtual currencies also help normalise billing data across regions, ensuring consistent £-based reporting for UK organisations [1].

Making the Right Choice for Your Organisation

Deciding between FOCUS and a custom solution comes down to understanding what fits your organisation's needs best. UK businesses face unique challenges depending on their cloud maturity, technical resources, and regulatory landscape. These factors align closely with the analyses covered earlier.

Key Decision Factors

Several considerations can help steer your decision. Managing multi-cloud and SaaS complexity is a major one. If your organisation relies on multiple platforms like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and various SaaS tools, FOCUS simplifies the process by offering a unified schema across all providers. This removes the hassle of creating custom mapping scripts and reduces the risk of errors in consolidated reports [1][4].

Regulatory and financial reporting requirements are equally crucial, especially for sectors like financial services, healthcare, or the public sector. These industries demand consistent and auditable cost data to meet internal and external scrutiny. FOCUS ensures this consistency with standardised columns and naming conventions, making it easier to maintain accuracy across providers [1][4]. Additionally, reporting speed and operational efficiency are key. If your data engineers spend excessive time cleaning and normalising billing data, FOCUS can alleviate this burden, enabling faster insights and quicker anomaly detection [1][3].

Your existing infrastructure also plays a pivotal role. If you've already built a robust data warehouse with tailored cost models for unit economics, internal chargebacks, or product-level P&L, a custom solution might still be the better fit, with FOCUS serving as an interchange format or an additional layer [3][6]. On the other hand, if your current processes involve spreadsheets, manual data handling, and fragmented workflows, FOCUS provides a scalable foundation to streamline operations.

Lastly, assess your in-house data engineering capacity. Custom setups require ongoing maintenance as cloud providers update billing formats or launch new services. For mid-sized UK businesses with limited engineering resources, this can become a bottleneck. By shifting much of the maintenance to cloud providers and the FinOps Foundation, FOCUS frees up your team to focus on optimisation and decision-making rather than data wrangling [1][4].

When to Choose FOCUS

FOCUS shines in several scenarios. For organisations with expanding multi-cloud environments, the advantages are clear. For instance, a UK-based SaaS company using AWS in London and Azure in North Europe can consolidate billing data into a single dashboard, compare compute costs across regions, and run standardised FinOps reports [1][3]. This approach seamlessly scales as you add providers or expand geographically.

Standardisation and FinOps best practices are another area where FOCUS excels. A large UK retailer with multiple business units can adopt FOCUS to ensure all teams use the same cost and usage definitions. This simplifies processes like chargeback, showback, and unit economic reporting, reducing confusion and improving collaboration between finance and engineering teams [1][4][5]. It also makes onboarding new staff or consultants easier, as they are likely already familiar with the FOCUS schema.

FOCUS is also ideal for organisations integrating with modern FinOps tools. A UK fintech using Datadog's Cloud Cost Management can ingest FOCUS-formatted data from AWS, Azure, and SaaS platforms, while extending visibility to custom providers by uploading FOCUS-compliant cost files - all within a unified dashboard [2].

As noted in the State of FinOps 2025, FOCUS is expected to see massive adoption in 2025 and beyond, with many teams eagerly awaiting FOCUS v1.2, which includes SaaS billing support [1].

Among organisations planning to use FOCUS, 54% intend to integrate it automatically into existing data pipelines, 30% aim to leverage it through third-party tools, and 16% plan to use manual data analysis of FOCUS-compliant files [1].

For UK businesses, FOCUS 1.2 introduces a virtual currency mechanism to consolidate multi-region spend, converting it into £-based reporting for leadership. This addresses a common challenge for organisations operating across multiple regions [4].

When Custom Solutions Are Preferable

There are cases where custom solutions remain a better choice, though these are often niche. Organisations with complex, bespoke billing models that don't align well with FOCUS's standard schema may need custom approaches. For example, a UK telecommunications company with intricate internal chargeback rules based on service tiers, customer segments, and SLA-based pricing might require extensive customisation beyond what FOCUS offers [4][5].

On-premise or hybrid environments also present challenges that FOCUS alone may not address. If a significant portion of your costs comes from data centres, colocation facilities, or legacy systems, you'll need to integrate these with cloud billing data in a way that FOCUS cannot currently support - though this may change as the Cloud+ scope evolves [4][6].

Finally, organisations with strict data residency or sovereignty requirements might prefer custom solutions. If regulations require all billing data and transformation logic to remain within tightly controlled internal systems, rather than relying on third-party tools or cloud provider exports - even if FOCUS-compliant - a custom approach provides the necessary control. However, this comes with higher engineering demands and the risk of losing institutional knowledge if key staff leave [3].

For many UK businesses, the best approach isn't choosing one over the other but combining both. Using FOCUS as the foundational layer and adding custom enrichment where needed creates a balance between standardisation and flexibility. This hybrid strategy supports scalability while maintaining the streamlined reporting capabilities discussed earlier.

Specialist consultancies like Hokstad Consulting can support either path, whether it's setting up FOCUS exports and integrating them into your data platform, or designing custom pipelines tailored to UK-specific needs like GBP conversions, VAT handling, and regulatory compliance. Their expertise bridges the gap between standardised solutions and bespoke requirements.

Conclusion

Deciding between FOCUS and custom solutions isn’t an either-or scenario. For most organisations in the UK, the real answer lies in blending the two approaches. FOCUS offers a reliable starting point by standardising cloud and SaaS billing data across providers. On the other hand, custom solutions allow organisations to address specific needs like internal cost allocation, regulatory compliance, or unique business logic.

FOCUS acts as a foundational layer that can be tailored with custom tagging, business mappings, and added metadata to meet internal finance, product, and engineering requirements [3]. While standardisation through FOCUS solves the problem of normalising data, it doesn’t eliminate the need for tailored business views. For organisations operating across regions, managing intricate departmental chargebacks, or meeting industry-specific regulations, custom transformations often remain necessary. However, these transformations are far simpler when built on a consistent FOCUS framework rather than reconciling disparate formats from multiple providers.

Adopting a Hybrid Approach

A hybrid approach combines the strengths of both methods. It uses FOCUS as the standard schema for raw billing data while layering on UK-specific reporting and business logic. This involves importing FOCUS-compliant data from providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud into a centralised data warehouse or lakehouse. From there, custom transformations can handle GBP-based reporting, VAT calculations, departmental tagging, or regulatory classifications [1][3][7].

Take, for instance, a UK financial services firm. They might use AWS FOCUS 1.2 exports as their base, then apply custom enrichment such as cost mappings and GBP conversions using FOCUS’s virtual currency features. This approach streamlines data collection and normalisation, saving time for teams to focus on analysis and decision-making [3]. At the same time, it maintains the flexibility to address specific business needs without overhauling the entire data model. For organisations with limited engineering capacity, this balance is especially valuable - it lets them rely on an industry standard for heavy lifting while still accommodating bespoke reporting where it matters most.

The FinOps Foundation advises organisations to evaluate where custom enrichment should occur - whether within their internal data platform or through third-party FinOps tools. They also recommend assessing whether FOCUS data should come directly from cloud providers, a FinOps tool, or an internal pipeline [3]. A phased approach often works best, starting with mapping existing schemas to FOCUS, validating reports by running systems in parallel, and then gradually transitioning dashboards and APIs to the FOCUS model.

Getting Expert Support

Transitioning to FOCUS, modernising legacy pipelines, or implementing a hybrid architecture requires both technical knowledge and an understanding of UK-specific challenges. Hokstad Consulting specialises in helping UK organisations streamline billing workflows, identify inefficiencies, and design tailored solutions.

Their expertise in cloud cost engineering focuses on cutting cloud expenses by 30–50% through strategies like right-sizing, automation, and resource optimisation, all while improving performance [8]. Hokstad Consulting can design efficient FOCUS-based workflows that ensure timely and accurate cost analytics. For organisations heavily reliant on custom solutions, they also offer support to refactor pipelines, making them compatible with FOCUS and easier to maintain [8].

Beyond pipeline optimisation, Hokstad Consulting provides custom development services for businesses needing bespoke enrichment layers on top of FOCUS. This includes automating CI/CD pipelines for billing data, implementing Infrastructure as Code for cost transformations, and creating custom dashboards that merge FOCUS data with UK-specific metrics. Their solutions aim to minimise manual effort and reduce errors [8].

For businesses unsure where to begin, Hokstad Consulting offers a free assessment to uncover optimisation opportunities [8]. This might include reviewing current billing workflows, benchmarking against FOCUS best practices, and recommending whether to fully adopt FOCUS, refine existing custom setups, or pursue a hybrid approach tailored to the organisation’s cloud environment and regulatory requirements. Their expertise also extends to broader initiatives like multi-cloud strategies and cost governance programmes.

Billing data pipelines aren’t a one-and-done task. Cloud providers frequently update formats, introduce new services, and tweak pricing models, while regulatory demands and business priorities shift over time. Having expert guidance - whether for the initial setup or ongoing refinement - ensures that your billing strategy remains effective, compliant, and aligned with your goals. For UK organisations, this means not just adopting FOCUS or custom solutions but building a scalable, adaptable approach that keeps cloud costs under control while supporting growth.

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