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Finance

Framework / Personas / Finance

Primary Goal: Accurately budget, forecast, and report cloud costs.

Finance teams work closely with FinOps practitioners to understand historic billing data so that they can collaborate and build accurate forecasting models used for planning and budgeting. Finance will also be a key participant in FinOps reporting, showback, chargeback, commitment discount purchasing, and invoice management with cloud providers.

Finance roles typically report to an organization’s CFO, including Corporate Finance, Strategic Planners, Financial Analysts, Budget Analysts, Financial Business Managers/Advisors, General Ledger, and Accounting. Finance may also include IT Financial Management roles which report to the CIO if they are the primary Finance persona working with Engineering teams, or they may be represented by the ITFM Persona in larger organizations.

Objectives

  • Cost out and budget maintenance
  • Prepare accurate forecasts
  • Report actual costs and trends
  • Normalize spend predictability

Challenges

  • Unpredictable, sometimes chaotic, cloud spend
  • Frustrated team as cloud cost accountability is distributed
  • Challenges with legacy finance models (cap-ex vs op-ex)

Key Metrics

  • Revenue Growth
  • Gross Margins
  • COGS (Cost of Goods Sold)
  • Unit Cost Economics
  • Budget and forecast transparency and accuracy
  • Policy compliance

FinOps Benefits

  • Identify unallocated spend
  • Facilitate showback/chargebacks to increase financial accountability
  • Drive budget and forecast accuracy
  • Guide team to make good cloud investments

FinOps Finance Persona includes:

  • Finance Analyst/Business Analyst
    These roles bring analytical skills and financial acumen, essential for FinOps. They understand budgeting, forecasting, and reporting.
  • IT Financial Management (ITFM) Analyst/Manager
    ITFM professionals are already concerned with IT costs, making FinOps a close adjacent field.
  • Technology Business Management (TBM) Analyst/Administrator
    TBMA professionals are already concerned with IT costs, making FinOps a close adjacent field.