Azure figures that match your CSP invoice

Some of the gap is by design. In a CSP client's own tenant, Azure Cost Management shows costs at pay-as-you-go retail rates, and Microsoft notes they don't include any discounts or credits the partner may have; partners see invoiced prices in the partner tenant instead (Microsoft Learn: Cost Management for partners). Reservation purchases appear in Azure's cost data as separate purchase charges, and the usage they cover is priced at zero (Microsoft Learn: reservation costs and usage).

Beyond that, Azure cost data and a CSP billing export rarely disagree about usage. They disagree about everything around it. In our own reconciliation work, every gap came from one of four places:

Cerberus Cloud works from Azure's actual cost data, which Microsoft describes as the dataset to reconcile with your monthly bill (Microsoft Learn). It takes each cost exactly as Azure records it in the billing currency, with no conversion on our side. Reservation purchases are kept separate from usage, so you can compare like with like, and reservation-covered usage is shown against the actual SKU it ran on.

For pricing Azure never sees, set a percentage discount or uplift per client on all costs, on reservations and savings plans, or on Marketplace purchases. Reports use the adjusted figures, and savings estimates are recalculated from them, so a saving you promise a client is a saving on the invoice they pay.

We reconciled Cerberus Cloud against a CSP distributor’s billing portal for an MSP client spending about £14,000 a month on Azure, over two months. Usage matched to within 0.1%, and every meter category matched to the penny. The remaining difference was rounding: Cerberus Cloud rounds each line, while the export rounds once on the total.

Cerberus Cloud also captured reservation purchases that the usage-only export left out. The one thing it could not see was the distributor’s own uplift on reservations, which is never in Azure’s cost data. That is exactly what the per-client adjustments are for.

The same reconciliation works for clients who buy Azure directly from Microsoft, so one process covers your whole portfolio. For what clients see in their own Azure portal, and why it differs from what you invoice, see Cerberus Cloud vs Azure Cost Management.