Financial Management
Alibaba Cloud provides tools that cover the full FinOps cycle: funding accounts, reconciling bills, issuing invoices, consolidating multi-account settlements, and allocating financial assets across business units.
Moving to the cloud changes how you control spending, track costs, and report to finance teams. Alibaba Cloud provides five financial management tools that cover the full FinOps cycle: from funding your account and reconciling bills, to issuing invoices, consolidating multi-account settlements, and allocating assets across business units.
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Manage funds with transaction details
Before purchasing products, your enterprise must have an Alibaba Cloud account with verified enterprise identity. Your finance team adds funds to the account balance, which covers both subscription purchases and automatic pay-as-you-go charges.
Use the View Transaction Details tool to track all income, expense, and transaction records for your account and any linked accounts.
Reconcile and settle bills
Alibaba Cloud generates monthly bills for all purchased and consumed cloud products. Use the Bills tool to reconcile and settle your cloud spend.
Bill data is organized in six levels of granularity, each built on the previous:
Monthly bill — The top-level settlement amount you owe Alibaba Cloud for a billing cycle. Combine it with the monthly bill details to generate a PDF reimbursement credential bearing the official Alibaba Cloud financial stamp. You can also settle a specific billing cycle independently.
Monthly bill details — A breakdown of the charges in the monthly bill. Combine it with the monthly bill to generate the same PDF reimbursement credential.
Billing details — A further breakdown of the monthly bill details, providing additional line-item visibility.
Detailed bill — A further breakdown of billing details, down to each instance or individual billable item. Use this level for granular cost analytics.
Split bill — A further breakdown of the detailed bill that allocates shared product costs — such as Content Delivery Network (CDN), Object Storage Service (OSS), and Internet Shared Bandwidth — to the specific resources that consumed them (domain names, buckets, and elastic IP addresses (EIPs)). Use split bills to support internal cost allocation and chargeback reporting by business service.
Amortized cost — A further breakdown of the split bill that spreads subscription and pay-as-you-go costs across each calendar month according to defined allocation rules. Use amortized cost to normalize cloud spend over time and simplify showback reporting.
Manage invoices
Use Request Invoices to centralize invoicing across all your accounts from a single account. To merge invoices from multiple accounts into one document, go to the Unified Settlement page and enable Consolidated Invoicing.
Consolidate multi-account settlement
Link an enterprise account with other accounts to establish a financial management relationship between a root account and its linked accounts.
In this relationship, the root account can manage linked accounts in bulk. Each linked account retains its own independent capabilities — including funds, credit limits, discounts, coupons, and invoicing — and can still transact and settle with Alibaba Cloud directly.
Use the Unified Settlement and Invoicing tool to let the root account pay the historical bills of linked accounts, eliminating the need to settle each account's bills separately.
Manage financial assets across accounts
Use the Financial Asset Management feature to centrally govern the financial relationship between a root account and its linked accounts. From the root account, you can:
Allocate and revoke funds and credit limits for linked accounts
Manage invoice information for linked accounts in bulk
Set up resource sharing for linked accounts