Cost Centres & Business Hierarchy

Overview

Your cloud cost data only becomes meaningful when it reflects how your business is structured. In OneLens, you can define a business-aligned hierarchy by setting up Cost Centers—so that every dollar spent is tied to a team, product, or initiative you care about.

With flexible mapping strategies and multi-level categorization, you get to decide how your cloud spend is grouped, tracked, and analyzed across your organization.

What is a Cost Centre?

A Cost Centre is a logical business unit that owns cloud spend.

It can represent:

• Business Unit

• Department

• Team

• Project

• Environment

Instead of looking at raw cloud bills, you see costs organized by who owns them.

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Business Hierarchy Structure

OneLens supports up to 4 levels of hierarchy.

Example:

Organization
 └── Business Unit
      └── Team
           └── Project / Environment

Costs always roll up from the lowest level to the top.

If:

• Production = $12,000

• Staging = $3,000

Then:

• Platform Team = $15,000

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How to Build Your Hierarchy

Navigate to:

Settings → Cost Allocation → Business Hierarchy

Step 1: Create Top-Level Organization

Define your root node.

Step 2: Add Child Levels

Add Business Units, Teams, Projects, or Environments under the appropriate parent.

Step 3: Map Resources to Leaf Nodes

Only leaf-level cost centres should directly own resources.

Mapping Strategies

You have the flexibility to organize your cloud usage using one or more of the following approaches:

1. Account-Based Mapping

If you're using separate AWS accounts for different teams, applications, or environments, OneLens lets you map those accounts directly to cost centers. You can group and analyze usage exactly the way your accounts are structured.

Use this when:

• Each department, team, or workload has its own account.

• You want a quick and reliable way to allocate costs with minimal setup.

2. Tag-Based Mapping

If you're tagging your AWS resources consistently, you can use those tags to align spend with your internal structure. OneLens lets you select tag keys and values to define how resources roll up into cost centers.

Use this when:

• You’ve already invested in good tag hygiene.

• You want fine-grained grouping based on team, project, or environment.

NOTE

OneLens does not perform tag audits. You are responsible for ensuring the quality of your tags.

3. Resource Group-Based Mapping

Sometimes accounts or tags alone aren't enough—especially if resources are shared. In such cases, you can manually group resources together and map them to cost centers based on how your teams actually use them.

Use this when:

• You have shared accounts with mixed workloads.

• You need custom groupings to reflect how teams consume resources.

Cost Center Categories

OneLens gives you the power to reflect your real-world business structure by defining up to four levels of cost center categories. This means you can slice and report your cloud costs in the way that aligns best with how your teams work and how you report performance.

Here are the categories you can use:

Category	What You Can Capture Here
Business Unit	High-level groups like Engineering, Finance, or Marketing.
Division	Sub-sections of a business unit, like North America Sales.
Product	Cloud usage tied to customer-facing products or internal tools.
Team	Functional groups like SRE, Backend, or QA.
Application	Logical applications such as Login Service or Analytics Engine.
Environment	Lifecycle stages like Dev, QA, Staging, or Production.
Project	Initiatives like Migration Effort, PoC Testing, or Launch Phase.
Others	Anything else you need to track but don’t see in other categories.

You can mix and match these dimensions to reflect the exact structure you need.

How to Create a Cost Center

To manage your cost centers in OneLens:

1

Go to Settings

From the main navigation, open the Settings section.

2

Check Under Business Mapping

Click on Organization Cost Centers to view and manage your business mapping.

From here, you can configure how your resources are grouped using account-based, tag-based, or resource group-based strategies—and assign them to relevant cost center categories like Business Unit, Product, Team, and Environment.

Important

Any changes you make to cost centers—including creation, updates, or deletions—will be published and reflected across OneLens after 24 hours.

How Costs Roll Up

• All costs must map to a leaf node.

• Parent nodes aggregate child costs automatically.

• Reports always reflect roll-up totals.

This enables:

• BU-level reporting

• Team-level optimization

• Executive dashboards

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Best Practices

• Mirror real budget ownership

• Keep structure simple initially

• Avoid unnecessary levels

• Assign ownership at the lowest responsible layer

Connecting Cost Centers to Virtual Tags

While cost centers define your business hierarchy, Virtual Tags give you another way to organize and analyze your cloud spend. You can manually create virtual tags based on accounts, tags, or resource attributes—even if AWS tags are missing or inconsistent.

Virtual Tags extend the power of cost centers across all OneLens views, making it easier for you to filter, allocate, and report costs at scale.

Learn more about Virtual Tags and how to create them