Cost Centres & tag-based reporting
Group your Azure spend by the values of a configured tag for chargeback, showback, and tagging hygiene.
Cost Centres group your Azure spend by the values of a configured tag, so you can report on cost by team, project, department, or any other organisational dimension. It's the primary surface in Cirrova for chargeback and showback reporting, and it underpins the Cost by cost centre report type in Reporting.
How Cirrova derives cost centres
Cirrova doesn't require a specific tag name. Instead, each tenant is configured with a tag prefix — any tag on a resource whose key starts with that prefix is treated as a cost-centre designation, and its value is used as the grouping dimension. Resources that don't carry a matching tag are grouped together as Untagged.
A prefix-match rather than an exact-match means you can use related keys together without extra configuration — for example, a prefix of cost would capture cost-centre, CostCode, and cost_owner in a single view. If your organisation has already standardised on a single key, set the prefix to that key's full name.
Configuration lives at the tenant level, so different tenants in the same Cirrova organisation can use different tagging conventions — useful for MSPs or businesses with independently-governed business units.
Configuring the cost-centre tag prefix
- Go to Organisation Settings → Tenants.
- In the row-actions menu (…) for the tenant you want to configure, click Settings.
- Under Cost tracking, find the Cost centres card and click Edit.
- Enter a Tag prefix and click Save. Leave the field blank to clear the configuration — the Cost Centres view will then show no data for that tenant.
Changes take effect on the next data refresh.
The Cost Centres view
The Cost Centres page (from the left navigation) shows aggregated spend by cost centre for the current tenant and date range.
Summary tiles
- Cost Centres — the number of distinct tag values found.
- Total Tracked Spend — total spend across resources that carry a matching tag, over the selected date range.
- Largest Cost Centre — the highest-spending cost centre by name.
- Untagged Resources — the count of resources not currently captured by the configured prefix. A View untagged resources link jumps to the Resources page filtered to untagged items, which is the fastest way to work through tagging gaps.
Charts
- Spend by cost centre — a donut showing relative share of spend across all cost centres.
- Top cost centres — a horizontal bar chart ranking cost centres by absolute spend.
Cost centre detail table
Columns: Cost Centre, Resources, Spend (period), Share (percentage with a progress bar). Clicking either the cost centre name or the arrow button at the end of the row drills through to the Resources page pre-filtered to that cost centre — the Tag key and Tag value filters are applied automatically, showing every resource contributing to that cost centre's total.
Tenant selector
When your Cirrova organisation has more than one connected tenant, a tenant selector appears at the top of the page — Cost Centres are scoped per-tenant because each tenant has its own prefix configuration. When only one tenant is connected, the selector is hidden.
Working with cost centres
Chargeback by team. Set the prefix to your organisation's cost-centre tag (e.g. CostCentre), tag every resource with its owning team's identifier, and use the Cost Centres page (or the scheduled Cost by cost centre report) to distribute cloud spend.
Finding tagging gaps. The Untagged Resources tile is a tagging-hygiene KPI. Any non-zero number means some spend isn't being attributed — click through to work down the list. For large estates, pair this with a scheduled Resource inventory report to track coverage over time.
Comparing environments or projects. If you tag resources with more than one dimension (for example, both a cost centre and a project code), pick the prefix that matches the dimension you're currently analysing. Switching the prefix in Tenant settings regroups the view without changing any resource tags.