Understanding account hierarchy

It's important to understand from what level enterprise management wants to see costs. Enterprises usually want a full overview of the total spend; hence we need to make sure that they can view that total spend from the top level all the way down to subscriptions that are owned by specific business divisions or even DevOps teams. These divisions or teams might have a full mandate to run their own subscriptions, but at the top level, the enterprise will want to see the costs that these units are accruing at the end of the day.

This starts with the setup of the tenants, the subscriptions, and the accounts in public cloud platforms. This has to be set up following a specific hierarchy. The good news for financial controllers is that these structures in the public cloud closely follow the rules of the Chart of Accounts (COA) hierarchy that is used for financial reporting. This hierarchy has one top level. There can be many accounts...