Use Azure billing and cost management to prevent unexpected costs

When a user signs up for Azure services, they can do several things to better adjust their costs.Azure pricing provides cost estimates before you create Azure resources. The Azure portal provides a breakdown of current costs for a subscription. You can download usage details for each month from the Account Center. You begin receiving monthly usage details when you purchase your subscription.This article explains how to estimate Azure charges and understand actual expenditures while you are using your Azure subscription.

Get a cost estimate before you add an Azure service

Method 1. Estimate costs online by using Azure pricing information and the Pricing Calculator

With the Pricing Calculator, you can select the Azure services that you want to use and the Calculator will automatically calculate your monthly estimated costs.

For example, if you run an A1 Windows Virtual Machine (VM) continuously, based on the number of hours of usage, the estimated cost would be 267.84 RMB per month, as shown here:

For more information about Azure pricing, see Azure pricing. If you need help to resolve your issue quickly, contact our support team.

Method 2: View estimated costs in the Azure portal

In general, when you add a service in the Azure portal, an estimate of your monthly costs is displayed. For example, when you select the size of a Windows VM, you can view the estimated monthly costs based on the number of hours of usage:

Get usage reports to find out your actual usage

Method 1: Get weekly remaining balance notifications by email

If you've purchased your subscription online, you receive a weekly balance notification email for each subscription.

Method 2: Download and understand monthly usage details

You can download monthly usage details from the Account Center. The details include a summary of your total monthly usage and detailed usage information for each service. You can also view usage for the current period directly in the Account Center.To learn more about how to download usage documents and understand the required access permissions, see Download usage details. To learn more about the information cited in the usage reports, see Understand your monthly usage report.

Other resources and exceptional circumstances

Enterprise Agreement customers and partner customers

To get started, consult your account administrator or Azure partner.

Product	Resources
Enterprise Agreement	Go to the Enterprise Portal, help documentation, and Power BI reports.
Partners	Ask your Azure partner.

If you are managing IT systems for a large organization, we recommend that you read Azure enterprise scaffold and Enterprise IT white paper (PDF download, available in English only).

Tag resources in Azure portal to sort billing data into groups

If you are an Enterprise Agreement customer, you can use tags to sort billing data for supported services into groups. The groups are then displayed in your usage reports. For example, if you are running multiple VMs for various teams, you can use tags to categorize the costs by cost center (human resources, marketing, finance) or environment (production, pre-production, testing).

All the tags show different cost report windows. You can view the details in the Detailed usage information.csv file after the first billing period.

For more information, see Use tags to organize Azure resources.

View a usage summary in the Enterprise Portal

Notes:

• In the usage reports, amounts that are already used are based on usage details and are independent of Pay-in-advance (PIA) amounts, excess usage allowances, included amounts, adjustments, and taxes.
• The information might be up to 5 days behind.
• If you cannot see your charges, it might be for one of the following reasons:
  • You are the account owner, and your registered administrator has disabled the Account owner can view charges setting. To obtain billing access permissions, contact your registered administrator.
  • You are the department administrator, and your registered administrator has disabled the Department administrator can view charges setting. To obtain access permissions, contact your registered administrator.
  • You purchased Azure through a channel partner, and the partner has not yet issued the pricing information.

If you are not the account administrator, ask your enterprise administrator to assign you the account administrator role and add billing access permissions from the Enterprise Portal.

If you need to manage billing but the account administrator no longer belongs to your organization, please contact our support team.

Contact Support

If you need help to resolve your issue quickly, contact our support team.