Budgets

Setting budgets in Stax gives greater visibility to you and your team of how you're tracking against budget. With a budget set, you can configure notifications to let you know when it looks like you're going to exceed your budget so you can take action before it's too late.

There are two ways you can set and view your budgets within Stax. You can either set total budget for all your AWS spend or you can set budgets for each segment within a View, i.e. each team, cost center, etc.

When you look at the Cost page, you'll see the budget displayed differently depending how you've set things up.

Before You Begin

• Estimated time to complete: 5 to 15 minutes
• Ensure you are a member of either the Admin or Cost & Compliance Admin role in Stax
• Determine your usage budgets in $USD (as AWS consumption pricing is accounted in $USD)

Organization Budgets

When setting an Organization Budget in Stax it's important to note that it functions as a monthly rolling budget. This means the budget is adjusted on a monthly basis, taking into account your organization's spend from previous months and is recalculated based on the remaining budget and months.  For instance, if a company sets an Organization Budget of $120,000 for the next 12 months, the budget for the first month, say January, would be $10,000. If the company spends $15,000 in January, the amount spent will be subtracted from the annual budget, resulting in $105,000 remaining for the remaining 11 months of the year. The monthly budget for the next month, February, would then be $9,545.45 ($105,000 / 11).

Create a Budget Alert to receive notifications when your current month's spend reaches 25%, 50%, 75%, 90%, and 100% of your monthly Organization budget.

Set Your Organization Budget

1. Log in to the Stax console

2. Navigate to the Cost Settings page

3. Enter the appropriate organization-wide budget in the Total Organization Budget ($USD) field. Ensure that Beginning of Financial Year is set correctly, as this determines when the annual budget resets
4. The page will save automatically

When you set the organization budget, you'll see a black line displayed on the Cost page that shows the relevant budget when you don't have any global filters selected.

Set Budgets That Leverage Your Views

1. Log in to the Stax console
2. Choose Views from the Settings menu
3. Choose the name of the View to add budgets to
4. Choose the Monthly Budgets tab
5. For relevant segments in the View, either set an annual budget in the Annual Budget column, or enter specific monthly budgets. Monthly budgets are useful for seasonal activity increases/decreases
6. Optionally, select Download CSV to export the View's budget data to CSV for further reporting and integration

When setting budgets, you can choose to have the budget apply to either Only Usage Costs (recommended) or All Allocated Costs. Consider the Financial Mode guidance when setting budgets. Specifically:

• Only Usage Costs will show only the usage amount. That is, billing items where the kind is usage
• All Allocated Costs is the same as enabling Financial Mode elsewhere in Stax. It shows all billing items, including tax, credits, support charges, and more. It shows the unblended cost for each billing item