View Your Cost Trends With Billing Reports

Overview

The Cloud Billing Reports page lets you view your Google Cloud Platform (GCP) usage costs at a glance and discover and analyze trends. The Reports page displays a chart that plots usage costs for all projects linked to a billing account. To help you view the cost trends that are important to you, you can select a data range, specify a time range, configure the chart filters, and group by project, product, or SKU.

Billing reports can help you answer questions like these:

• How is my current month's GCP spending trending?
• What project cost the most last month?
• What GCP product (for example, Compute Engine or Cloud Storage) cost me the most?
• What are my forecasted future costs based on historical trends?

Note: Historical billing data is available back to January 2017.

Getting started

To view the Cloud Billing reports for your billing account:

1. Go to the Google Cloud Platform Console.
2. Open the console left side menu and click Billing.
3. If you have more than one billing account, select Go to linked billing account to view the current project's billing account. To locate a different billing account, select Manage billing accounts and choose the account for which you'd like to see reports.
4. Select Reports from the left side menu.

Permissions

As long as you have Billing Account Administrator or Billing Account Viewer permissions for your billing account, you can view billing reports for it, including cost information for all projects that roll up to it. (Specifically, you need the billing.accounts.getSpendingInformation permission on your billing account. To learn more about billing permissions, see Cloud Billing API Access Control.)

Note: If someone else manages your billing account, you may not have the necessary billing permissions. If this is the case and you think you should be able to view costs for your project, contact the person in your organization who manages your GCP account.

How to read the billing report chart

The report chart displays a stacked line chart where each line plots cost over time. The Group by setting determines what each line represents (each grouping gets its own line in the chart and row in the table).

The default view uses the Current month, all projects preset. In the default view:

• The report displays the current month’s daily usage-specific costs grouped by project (for all GCP products), inclusive of any usage-specific credits applied.

  Note: Usage-specific cost and credit does not include account-level costs and credits reported on your invoice (for example, taxes, contractual credits, or surcharges). For more information, see Data availability.

• The summary bar above the chart provides a split view of cost: actual cost-to-date for the current month, and the total forecasted cost for the entire current month.

• A cost trend line in the chart indicates the direction your forecasted cost is trending.

• Each line in the chart (and row in the summary table) corresponds to the project, ranked largest to smallest by cost.

Changing chart settings

Credits

You can change the chart view to exclude usage-specific credits by unchecking the corresponding discounts or promotions checkboxes in the Credits section in the right panel.

Usage-specific credits are applied directly to usage line items. There are two types of credits: discount credits (discounts) and promotional credits (promotions).

Discount credits are recurring and often considered a fundamental part of the final cost.

• Discount credits include: sustained use discounts, committed use discounts, and certain free tier credits (for products that apply credits to implement their free tier).

• For example, to understand your ongoing Compute Engine costs, you need to know your VM core and RAM usage costs as well as the sustained use discounts and committed use discounts generated by your core and RAM usage.

Promotional credits are one-time use and are typically considered a form of payment.

• Promotional credits include GCP Free Trial and marketing campaign credits.

• Tip: To understand your ongoing GCP costs after your GCP free trial expires, uncheck the Promotions checkbox.

Note: If you have any discount credits in your GCP costs, you will see the corresponding checkboxes under the Discounts section.

Time aggregation

You can specify a different time aggregation using the Daily/Monthly list at the top right of the chart.

Note: Time periods in the billing report use the Pacific Time Zone, and observe daylight saving time shifts.

Chart style

You can specify a different chart display style using the Line Chart/Bar Chart selector at the top right of the chart.

Data order

You can change the ordering of the data in the chart by sorting by different columns in the summary table. For example, to rank projects from smallest to largest by cost, click the Cost after credits column title.

Preset views

The following preset views are available:

1. Current month, all projects (default): The current calendar month's daily cost for all products and SKUs, grouped by project, inclusive of any usage-specific credits applied.
2. Current month, all products: Same as (1), but grouped by products (for example, Compute Engine or Cloud Storage).
3. Last month, all projects: The last calendar month's (not the last 30 days') daily cost for all products and SKUs, grouped by project, inclusive of any usage-specific credits applied.
4. Last month, all products: Same as (3), but grouped by products.
5. Last week, all projects: The last calendar week's (not the last 7 days') daily cost for all products and SKUs, grouped by project, inclusive of any usage-specific credits applied. A calendar week runs Sunday through Saturday.
6. Last week, all products: Same as (5), but grouped by products.

Filtering and grouping

In addition to the preset views, you can customize your view using the drop-downs for filtering and grouping.

Supported filters:

• Time range: You can select a preset or custom time range for charting cost data. The default is Current month.
• Group by: You can use the Group by list to group your cost data by subaccount, project (default), product, or SKU. Each grouping gets its own line (or bar) in the chart and row in the table.
• Projects: You can select all projects under the billing account (default) or select a subset of projects by clicking them in the list.
• Products: You can select all products (default) or select a subset of products by clicking them in the list.
• SKUs: You can select all SKUs (default) or select a subset of SKUs by clicking them in the list. To learn more about SKUs, see the Google Cloud Platform SKUs page.
• Subaccounts: If your billing account has subaccounts, you can select all subaccounts (default) or select a subset of subaccounts by clicking them in the list.
• Credits: You can select all usage-specific credits (default) to be included in the cost calculations, or you can uncheck some or all of the credit options.

Viewing your forecasted costs

You can use the forecast feature to see how your costs are trending and how much you are projected to spend.

If you are viewing your billing report using a date range that ends in a future date, your billing report chart displays both actual costs and forecasted costs:

• The summary bar above the chart provides a split view of cost: actual cost-to-date calculated from the starting date, and the total forecasted cost for the entire date range.
• A cost trend line in the chart indicates the direction your forecast is trending.

Note: The cost forecast is an approximation based on your historical trends.

Forecasts are available for:

• Any combination of filters.
• Any date range that ends with a future date.
  • If you are viewing the report for the current month, the default end date is month end.
  • If you choose to specify a Time range, pick a date range with the To: date set for a future date.

The cost trend is determined by:

1. Analyzing all of your historical GCP spend for the filters you have currently selected.
2. Selecting the most relevant, recent subset of data to use in the predictive model. For example, if a recent application launch caused a sharp increase in usage, the history selection algorithm may only look at data from after the application launch.
3. Generating a linear predictive model using that subset of data.

The total forecasted cost combines:

• The total actual cost to date in the selected time period.
• The predicted cost for each future day in the same time period.

The time range selected for the report does not affect what data is used to generate the cost trend and forecast. For example, if you are viewing a report for the current month, cost data from previous months is still used to fit the trend.

Data availability

In billing reports, cost data is available back to January 2017 at the SKU level. Data at the sub-SKU level (for example, by resource ID) is not currently available.

The following data is included in billing reports:

• SKU usage: This is reported in the pricing units shown on the Google Cloud Platform SKUs page, for example, gibibyte month.

• SKU cost: The SKU cost is based on the list price or contractual price for that usage. It is reported in the currency that your billing account is charged in.

  Note: Depending on the service, usage reporting may be delayed by a few days, which explains why your cost trends may sharply fall to zero over the last few days even if you know your usage hasn't fallen off. Most services generally report usage within hours or a day.

• Usage-specific credits: This includes any credits or discounts that were applied directly to the SKU usage such as sustained use discounts, committed use discounts, or free trial and other promotional credits that were applied.

The following data is not currently included in billing reports:

• Taxes: Taxes that were applied to your invoice are not currently reported.

• Account-level billing modifications: These could be credits or surcharges applied at the account level due to billing corrections, contractual requirements, and so on. Refer to your invoice for these charges.

• Invoice details: Currently we do not support graphing or grouping usage by invoice date or number.

Note: Invoices generally include all costs incurred during a given calendar month, but the cost for some products' usage at the very end of a calendar month may roll over to the next month's invoice.

FAQs

How do I see the data behind billing reports?

You can configure your billing account to export data to BigQuery or to a CSV or JSON file in Cloud Storage, and then use BigQuery or your own tools to analyze the exported cost line items. This is the same data that your billing reports use, but billing export data is only available starting when you enable export.

Can I save or bookmark my billing report view?

You can print the billing report or recreate it with billing export data, but currently we don't offer a way to save or bookmark billing report views.

How do I filter or group costs by zone, region, or multi-region?

Billing reports currently doesn't support filtering or grouping by zone, region or multi-region. (Some SKU names have the region or multi-region in them, for example, "Americas", "EMEA", "Japan", "Netherlands". You can use the SKU filter to search for and select them.)