Credits are not included in Power BI reports

[ArneSaether]

🐛 Problem

When comparing the invoices to the Power BI report CostSummary, we found a significant deviation several months. It seems to be related to missing credits in the Power BI report. So far for 2024, the deviation was more than 100.000 EURO. I have made a comparison for all the months in 2024 and we see the same pattern

👣 Repro steps

1. Go to Cost Management view in Azure Portal and look at your invoices
2. Click on one invoice for comparison
3. Then open the Cost Summary Power Bi report
4. Select Summary and use the same time period as for the invoice

🤔 Expected

I hope this can be included in the Power BI Report to ensure we have the same numbers on our invoices as in the Power Bi Report

📷 Screenshots

I have added one screenshot of the invoice from March and one screenshot from the Power Bi report

🙋‍♀️ Ask for the community

We could use your help:

1. Please vote this issue up (👍) to prioritize it.
2. Leave comments to help us solidify the vision.

[flanakin]

Cost Management does not include credits in cost details, which is why you aren't seeing this here.

I'm torn whether to say this is a feature request on Cost Management to include credits in cost details or a feature request for toolkit reports to pull credits from the Billing APIs.

If your expectation is that credits must be in the cost data, I would recommend raising this with the Cost Management team directly. You can do this through your Microsoft rep, if working with one, or by creating a support request if you feel this is a "bug" level issue. The team will likely close this as a feature request, but that would at least give you a forum to convey the criticality of it. Not the best way to handle this, but I'm not aware of a better option to raise issues.

From a toolkit perspective, we can keep this in the backlog as a feature request, but I have to be honest that this will be a bit challenging to implement as it would require us to add some new infrastructure to call new APIs that we don't have today. Not insurmountable, but I don't think it'll be a quick one.

Please feel free to vote the issue up with a 👍 and pass it around to others to vote up as well. We try to prioritize the issues with the most votes, so if this bubbles up, we can figure out how to prioritize it.

[ArneSaether]

Thank you for your quick reply, @flanakin . To be honest I wasn't sure if this was a bug or a feature either ;-) I would like our financial controllers to use the Cost Summery Power Bi report, since this gives us an instant overview of the cost. Therefore I would like this to be as accurate as possible. We can't expect this to be the same, but the deviation can't be to big either. I will discuss this with our Microsoft rep team as well and also in the FinOps community :-)

[saleemmy]

Definitely this is what I was trying to figure out. When you get credits the monthly spend gets adjusted and I think it should be shown as savings. sometimes credits come as part of returning RI.