Frequently asked questions around FOCUS

FinOps X 2026 · June 8-11 · San Diego

FOCUS FAQs

Is FOCUS part of the FinOps Foundation?

FOCUS is a separate Project supported by the FinOps Foundation (which is itself a Project of the Linux Foundation). The FOCUS Project manages the intellectual property and licensing rights associated with contributions to and use of the FOCUS Specification.

The FinOps Foundation financially supports FOCUS for its operational needs, and provides program management, contractor, and staff support. Many FOCUS Contributing Members and Steering Committee Members are involved in both Projects.

The FinOps Foundation also develops content such as FOCUS Validators, FOCUS Converters, training courses, certification courses, and other content related to the Specification. These resources benefit the FinOps Foundation community and assist with the adoption of FOCUS by the FinOps Foundation community.

Who governs FOCUS?

FOCUS is led by its own Steering Committee and follows these Operating Procedures.

The Specification is driven by open governance to ensure not only neutrality, but also to protect it from IP infringement claims and make it safe for broad adoption. Each release must pass through a rigorous process of community contribution, review, approvals, ratification, and IP review. This is all done in the open via Github.

What type of Project is FOCUS?

FOCUS is a Joint Development Foundation (JDF) Project. JDF is part of the Linux Foundation network and handles the formation and governance of open Projects. Using JDF allows open Projects with multiple types of technical deliverables (source code, technical reports, specifications, and data) like FOCUS to form quickly and collaborate under a standard set of guidelines and legal frameworks.

What does it mean to be a FOCUS Member?

Being a Member of the FOCUS Project means you have signed the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) and established a relationship with the Project, its goals, and the Specification. Members of the Project are companies or organizations who allow their employees to participate as Contributors under the terms of the CLA. You do not need to be a FinOps Foundation member in order to be a FOCUS Member, and there is no cost to contribute to FOCUS.

How do I become a FOCUS Member?

Your organization should first sign a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). The CLA is a legal agreement between the Contributor and FOCUS allowing FOCUS to use and license the contribution as part of its work products. If you’re an employee of a company, your company may need to provide you with permission to sign such an agreement, or may need to sign the CLA on your behalf by becoming a Member of FOCUS.

Do I need to sign a license agreement to contribute to FOCUS?

Yes, every contributor to FOCUS outputs must be a Member, and sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA). This can be done by accessing the FOCUS GitHub repository. Any Member organization that has signed the CLA may contribute issues, content, or pull requests to the Project work products.

Where will FOCUS contributions, resources and Project-related assets be managed?

FOCUS will store and disseminate its work products via GitHub. We are generally planning to use a “hybrid contribution” model, meaning that while changes may be made by contributors’ direction in GitHub, input may also be provided via participation in FOCUS Groups. This input will be entered into GitHub, which will remain the official record of the Specification.

Do I need to join the FinOps Foundation to contribute to FOCUS?

No, membership in FOCUS does not require FinOps Foundation membership. Companies and organizations that sign the Contributor License Agreement (CLA) can designate Contributors to the FOCUS Project.

What is a FOCUS Data Generator?

An entity that produces and delivers FOCUS-conformant billing data to practitioners. Data generators include cloud service providers, SaaS/PaaS vendors, FinOps platforms, and internal tools that transform or aggregate cost and usage data into the FOCUS schema.

Do I need to be a FinOps Certified Practitioner to contribute to FOCUS?

No, there is no requirement that the representative of a Member Organization be a FinOps Certified Practitioner to contribute to FOCUS, but, in our opinion, it always helps.

How do FinOps Practitioners adopt the FOCUS Specification?

FinOps Practitioners should visit the FOCUS Column Library and the FinOps Use Case Library to get familiar with the columns in the Specification, their definitions, and the data in the columns.

Read more here about how FinOps Practitioners are using FOCUS.

How do clouds and vendors make our offering(s) conformant with the FOCUS Specification?

For vendors, adoption of the FOCUS Specification means:

Ingesting FOCUS-formatted datasets

Using FOCUS terms and concepts in your platform’s user interface and reports

Exporting FOCUS-formatted data via API

Generating billing data for your customers in the FOCUS format

Providing clear and transparent documentation of FOCUS version support and any conformance gaps

Read more about how FinOps Tools are adopting FOCUS.

Why hasn't my provider adopted the latest version of FOCUS?

After the release of an updated version of the FOCUS Specification, it is up to each generator of FOCUS data to determine how and when they will adopt it.

To comply with antitrust laws (see #13 under Project Charter), the FOCUS Project Members cannot know the details of any provider's implementation plans, including when that provider expects to support any version of the Specification.

How do I get my provider to adopt FOCUS?

We encourage FinOps Practitioners to communicate your need for FOCUS datasets to your cloud service providers and other providers by:

1. Downloading the data from cloud service providers who are making it available today. Downloading this data signals to the vendor that customers want this data, and so the provider should invest in delivering it.

2. Telling providers directly that you need billing data from them to be delivered in the FOCUS format.

What is a FOCUS Dataset?

A structured collection of columns that conforms to the requirements established by the FOCUS specification. FOCUS currently defines two datasets: Cost and Usage (the primary billing dataset) and Contract Commitment (a supporting dataset describing contractual terms between providers and customers).

Data generators may include custom columns (prefixed with x_) where additional context is needed beyond the standard FOCUS columns.

How does FOCUS help me reconcile usage to invoices?

You can tie consumption records to invoice line items across providers, catch invoice errors before payment, and shorten the monthly close process. FOCUS enables this through an Invoice Reconciliation supported feature that joins the Invoice Detail dataset to Cost and Usage on InvoiceId. InvoiceDetailId supports line-item reconciliation, and PaymentCurrencyInvoiceDetailId links records when billing and payment currencies are tracked at different grains.

What are the Invoice Detail and Billing Period datasets?

They let FinOps, accounts payable, and finance teams work from the same billing data by bringing the invoice-level financial view of spend into FOCUS, alongside the Cost and Usage dataset (available in FOCUS 1.4 and later):

Invoice Detail carries charges as they appear on issued invoices, including payment currency, payment terms, payment due date, and purchase order number. It also captures items such as tax that are typically excluded from the Cost and Usage dataset.

Billing Period provides invoice-issuer-aware billing period boundaries and status, so period-over-period analysis stays accurate even when billing periods do not align with calendar months.

Why don't my FOCUS costs match my invoice exactly?

Small differences are expected, and FOCUS defines a tolerance so reconciliation does not fail on rounding noise. Cost and Usage data is often stored at higher decimal precision than the two-decimal totals on an invoice. The Rounding Variance Tolerance sets an acceptable, statistically grounded range, so reconciled sums are considered to match an invoice within that range.

What is the Contract Commitment dataset?

It lets you compare commitment structures across providers from a single dataset, without portal lookups or contract reviews. The Contract Commitment dataset describes commitment-based purchases (such as reservations and spend or usage commitments) in a provider-agnostic way, covering a commitment's identification, lifecycle and periods, structure, and cost and quantity. So questions like payment schedule, usage-based versus spend-based, and discount rate have standard answers.

On the Cost and Usage dataset, the ContractApplied column uses a defined JSON Object Schema so its contents can be parsed without provider-specific knowledge.

What are covered and covering charges?

They let you aggregate cost consistently across providers without learning each provider's commitment and marketplace rules. They are the two halves of FOCUS's provider-agnostic model for cost recognition:

A covering charge is a purchase that pays for other charges (e.g., a reserved instance prepayment or a marketplace credit pool).

A covered charge is consumption that draws against a covering charge (e.g., hourly compute consuming a reservation).

Recognized cost moves from the covering charge to the charges it covers. A covering purchase has an EffectiveCost of 0, and across a covering charge and everything it covers, EffectiveCost and BilledCost sum to the same total within the covering charge's charge period.

How do I measure my commitment coverage with FOCUS?

You can calculate a true coverage rate (covered eligible spend divided by total eligible spend) and spot uncovered savings opportunities, even across providers. FOCUS supports this with the CommitmentProgramEligibilityDetails column on Cost and Usage, paired with a Commitment Program Eligibility Details supported feature.

It identifies which commitment programs a charge qualifies for, whether or not a commitment is currently applied, giving you the denominator that coverage math previously lacked. It covers both discount-bearing programs (such as flexible spend plans and resource reservations) and capacity-reservation programs, and works even for SaaS providers that do not itemize commitment discounts per row.

Can I use only a subset of FOCUS columns and still be conformant?

Yes. You can trim a dataset to just the columns a workflow needs, which cuts storage and processing cost, and it stays conformant because every included column still meets its full requirements. This is governed by the DatasetConfiguration attribute. A companion attribute, DatasetCompleteness, governs the data generator side, so the columns remain available for you to pull when you need them.

How does FOCUS represent billing corrections and data delivery?

Knowing how a data generator issues corrections and deliveries lets you process billing data predictably across providers without provider-specific logic. Two attributes make these behaviors explicit:

CorrectionHandling documents how corrections are surfaced: Replacement (a complete snapshot overwrites the prior one), Delta (additive records carry the net change), or Ledger (explicit reversals and re-entries preserve a full audit trail).

DeliveryHandling documents how deliveries arrive: Overwrite (a complete snapshot) or Append (records added while prior deliveries are preserved). FOCUS bars any implementation that would force you to deduplicate records.

How do I find what changed between FOCUS versions?

Before adopting a version, you can see every change it brings and plan for anything that affects you. Each FOCUS release is accompanied by a changelog listing the columns, attributes, datasets, and supported features that were added, modified, or removed, along with any deprecations. Review the changelog for the version you are moving to so you can plan for renamed or removed elements.

A FOCUS column I was using was removed or renamed. What should I do?

You can move to the replacement column without losing any information. When FOCUS removes a column, it is because the column was deprecated in an earlier release and replaced with one or more successors that capture the same information more precisely.

Check the changelog for the version where the column was deprecated; it names the replacement. For example, ProviderName and PublisherName were replaced by ServiceProviderName, HostProviderName, and InvoiceIssuerName, along with data generator metadata. Map your reports to the successor before adopting the release that removes the original.

Will upgrading to a newer version of FOCUS break my existing dashboards?

You can upgrade on a predictable schedule rather than reacting to surprise breakage. FOCUS follows a deprecation lifecycle: when a column or attribute will be removed or replaced, it is first deprecated in a release with a named successor and only removed in a later release. Because breaking changes are announced in advance, reviewing the changelog for the version you are adopting tells you which deprecations apply to you and when to act.

What do requirement keywords like MUST, SHOULD, and MAY mean in FOCUS?

These keywords tell you what a data generator has to do to be conformant versus what is advisory. FOCUS uses the requirement keywords defined by BCP-14, the standard convention for technical specifications: MUST and MUST NOT express absolute requirements, SHOULD and SHOULD NOT express strong recommendations that can be overridden with good reason, and MAY expresses optional behavior. They appear in uppercase only within requirements sections.

How do FOCUS conformance and certification relate to specification versions?

When you require a particular FOCUS version from a provider, you are also asking about conformance to that version's rules. Conformance is defined per specification version, and the FOCUS Validator tests a data generator's output against a specific version's requirements. A data generator certifies against the version it produces. Check the FOCUS Validator and Conformance Program for the versions currently supported.

Where can I see what's planned for future FOCUS versions?

You can see what is under consideration and help shape it. FOCUS is developed in the open: planned work and proposed features are tracked as feature requests in the FOCUS GitHub repository and discussed on the community calls and in the FOCUS Working Group. The project welcomes feature requests for future releases, so attending the calls and reviewing open feature requests is the best way to get involved.

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