Key Insight: The FOCUS 1.3 specification solves three persistent problems: splitting shared resource costs, tracking contract commitments accurately, and verifying data freshness. Practitioners gain allocation transparency for provider-defined services that rely on containers and databases, while providers can now signal completeness and recency—building practitioner trust in their multi-cloud reporting workflows.
What’s New in FOCUS 1.3
The FOCUS Steering Committee ratified the FOCUS version 1.3 specification on December 5, 2025. The improvements in this FOCUS release help satisfy these primary use cases:
Track Contract Commitments in a Dedicated Dataset
Problem: Contractual commitments, discounts, or details that are only described in service provider contracts are difficult to tie back to the data presented in cost and usage datasets. This makes understanding how much of practitioners’ existing cost and usage is applicable to the contract terms they’ve signed with their service providers.
Change in 1.3:This new, supplemental “Contract Commitment” dataset isolates contract terms—start/end dates, remaining units, descriptions—from cost/usage rows. One query shows all active commitments.
Why this change is meaningful:
- This is the first instance of extending FOCUS language to an adjacent dataset, giving practitioners a structured method to understand their contract commitments.
- Ensures that the appropriate permissions are applied to this separate dataset, given the likely sensitive details it contains.
- Sets an example and encourages exploration of other supplemental datasets for FOCUS
Who benefits: Procurement, finance teams managing contract performance, cost optimization leads
Learn more: The specification provides additional details for Contract Commitments through the Contract Commitment supported feature and corresponding glossary entry.
Split Shared Costs and Understand of Data Generators’ Allocation Method
Problem: Shared resources (such as Kubernetes pods, database instances) force Practitioners to build custom allocation logic.
Change in 1.3: New allocation-specific columns let data generators expose how they split costs across workloads. Practitioners can now see the methodology, not just the output.
Why this change is meaningful: Some data generators give you the opportunity to split the cost of service services/resources, but that capability and rationale for how a resource was split wasn’t available in FOCUS.
Who benefits: Platform engineering teams, FinOps analysts allocating shared infrastructure, DevOps leaders managing multi-tenant clusters.
Learn more: The specification provides additional details for Split Cost Allocation through the Data Generator-Calculated Split Cost Allocation supported feature and corresponding attribute.
Verify Data Recency and Completeness
Problem: Processing stale or incomplete cost and usage data exports can break automated reconciliation workflows. Practitioners might only discover missing rows well after month-end close.
Change in 1.3: Providers must now timestamp datasets (last-updated metadata) and flag completeness status. You know immediately if data is final or subject to revision.
Why this change is meaningful: Data is complete and relevant so that users feel confident in making decisions with it, and can avoid processing data which are not yet complete
Who benefits: Data engineers, Billing Ops, and anyone else automating reports or triggering workflows on FOCUS data.
Learn more: The specification provides additional details for recency and completeness through the Recency metadata supported feature and corresponding requirements.
Service Provider and Host Provider Columns
Problem: Previous definitions for provider and publisher entities weren’t specific enough for practitioners and data generators to consistently populate the right columns in the FOCUS specification.
Change in 1.3: Distinguish between the provider that makes a resource or service available for purchase (Service Provider) from the provider that the underlying resource or service is deployed on (Host Provider). This also disambiguates reseller relationships across entity types.
Why this change is meaningful: Without making the delineation between Service Provider and Host Provider, it’s not obvious to practitioners who they should engage with for support and billing inquiries. While these two entities are often the same, they are also often different.
Who benefits: FinOps teams performance cost allocation and optimization activities across their technology providers.
Learn More: The specification provides additional details for Service Provider and Host Provider through the participating entity identification supported feature.
Column Deprecation Notices
Service Provider and Hosting Provider columns are replacing two current FOCUS Columns to improve clarity and overall functionality. We are marking the following columns which they are replacing for deprecation in 1.3. These columns will be available in 1.3 but fully removed from the FOCUS specification starting with v1.4.
- Provider: We chose to deprecate this column to provide the additional specificity that practitioners and data generators needed to accurately reflect their multi-dimensional billing relationships.
- Publisher: We chose to deprecate this column as it habitually conflicted with the additional billing entities described across our documented scenarios.
Get full details of these and other changes can be found in the Changelog.
FOCUS Conformance Activities
In addition to specification changes, work has been continuing to establish a conformance program to validate FOCUS dataset content and structure, and increase practitioner trust in the FOCUS-formatted datasets they receive from data generators. Concurrent with the 1.3 release, the FOCUS Project has:
- Used the FOCUS Normative Requirements to create the FOCUS Requirements Model:
- Supports v1.2 requirements to start, with 1.3 and v1.4 to be added during the 1.4 development cycle.
- The Requirements Model can be used to explore the relationship between existing requirements and evaluate how conformant a billing dataset is against the FOCUS spec.
- Launched FOCUS Validator 2.0, allowing Data Generators and practitioners to evaluate how conformant their FOCUS-formatted billing data is against v1.2 normative requirements
- FinOps Foundation is launching a conformance certification program for data generators in 2026 focused on public availability of:
- Sample data that validates conformance and conformance gaps for specific versions of FOCUS
- Mapping from data generator of native billing format to FOCUS format (e.g., 1:1, transformation logic, or not supported)
- Conformance Gap report documenting support levels for column and attribute requirements
What’s Next in Version 1.4?
Over the past year, the FOCUS project has built a backlog of feedback and requests which Members began working on immediately after the completion of version 1.3. Features actively under development for 1.4 include:
- Introducing a FOCUS Invoice Dataset
- Expanded Contract Commitment dimensions
- Non-functional requirements to improve provider consistency
The FOCUS project always welcomes feature requests for future releases. We rely on community input—attend, learn, and get involved in the conversation on our FOCUS community calls, share feedback directly with the FOCUS Working Group, and join the FOCUS Project to help us develop the next release. Future versions will continue to deepen support for cloud and SaaS billing while expanding to additional spending scopes, including Data Center and AI.
Getting Started with FOCUS
The FOCUS specification and its adoption benefits the entire FinOps community. Whether or not your organization is a Member of the FOCUS project, there are several critical things you can do to support FOCUS adoption better the practice of FinOps more broadly:
Adopt FOCUS Terminology
Whether you’re working with a FOCUS dataset from your providers or not, align on FOCUS terminology across your organization. This approach scales seamlessly as you add providers.
- Explore the Column Library to master each column definition, understand related capabilities, and identify relevant use cases.
- Browse the Use Case Library to access the complete catalog of supported use cases by version, including baseline SQL queries that accelerate your implementation.
Obtain Your FOCUS Data
Check the Getting Started section on the FOCUS website to confirm your provider supports FOCUS exports. Request your billing data in FOCUS format, or if unavailable, submit a feature request with your provider asking them to enable FOCUS exports.
Complete the FOCUS Training Curriculum
Enroll in both the Intro to FOCUS and FOCUS Analyst courses. The Analyst training reflects the latest FOCUS 1.3 release—previous participants automatically access updated content. We refresh all training materials as part of the FOCUS releases to ensure you’re working with current best practices.
Speak with your Vendors and Publishers about FOCUS
FOCUS is the common language of technology billing, and it’s made more effective as it is more broadly adopted by technology vendors. More consistent FOCUS billing data is in everyone’s best interest, and vendors listen to their customers’ input. If you have relationships with an AI service vendor, cloud provider, SaaS vendor, or other publisher, let them know that you’d appreciate them adopting the FOCUS standard for their billing data.
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