Financial Management

Financial management of enterprises after moving to the cloud will also change due to the characteristics of cloud computing. In the cloud usage process, Alibaba Cloud provides financial management tools to achieve efficient management of funds, accounts, invoices, and cloud financial assets across multiple organizations and departments.

Use Income and Expense Details to Manage Funds

Alibaba Cloud opens accounts for enterprise users, making it convenient for enterprises to make product purchases in the cloud. The finance department of the enterprise can recharge the account, and the recharged amount can be used to offset orders for yearly/monthly packages or automatically deducted from bills generated by pay-as-you-go products. Using the "Income and expense details" tool, you can grasp the current account and the financial records of income, expenses, etc. for associated accounts.

Use Tools for Reconciliation and Settlement

Cloud products that have been purchased and consumed will be presented in the form of monthly bills. The Bill tool can be used for reconciliation and settlement. Alibaba Cloud provides various types of bills to help enterprises understand and manage cloud finance operations.

• The monthly bill is the bill data that users need to settle with Alibaba Cloud. It can be combined with "Monthly Bill Details" to generate a PDF document with Alibaba Cloud's financial dedicated seal as a reimbursement voucher. Customers can specify the repayment of a specific bill separately in multiple billing periods.

• Monthly Bill Details provide further explanations for the "Monthly Bill" data. It can be combined with the monthly bill to generate a PDF document with Alibaba Cloud's financial dedicated seal as a reimbursement voucher. Customers can separately repay the monthly bill for a specific billing period.

• Bill transaction records provide further explanations for the "Monthly Bill Details" data.

• Detailed billing provides further explanations for the "Bill Transaction Records" data. In order to facilitate more detailed data analysis by users, the system splits the amount of the entire bill into each instance or even each charge item in the detailed bill.

• Split billing provides further explanations for the "Detailed Billing" data. In order to help users distinguish the costs of each business, the split billing supports splitting the costs of split-type cloud products (such as CDN, OSS, shared bandwidth, etc.) into various split items (such as domains, buckets, EIPs, etc.), providing reference data for internal accounting in enterprises.

• Amortized cost provides further explanations for the "Split Billing" data. In order to help users quickly understand the cost allocation of cloud resources, the amortized cost supports allocating the costs corresponding to prepaid and postpaid services to the calendar month according to specified allocation rules.

Use the Invoice Issuance Tool to Manage Invoices

Enterprises can obtain unified invoices through the "Invoice Issuance" tool: either obtaining invoices from all other accounts within one account, or accessing the "Unified Settlement" page to merge multiple invoices from multiple accounts into a single invoice through "Consolidated Invoicing" within one account.

Use the Unified Settlement Tool for Settlement

An enterprise account can establish main and linked account, "Financial Management" association with other existing accounts or newly created accounts. Under the "Financial Management" association, the main account can manage operations on behalf of the linked accounts in batches, while the linked accounts still have independent abilities to transact and settle with Alibaba Cloud, such as managing funds, credit limits, discounts, vouchers, and invoicing. Using the "Unified Settlement" tool, the main account can make unified payments for the historical bills of associated linked accounts, solving the tedious problem of separate settlement for main and linked accounts.

Using the Financial Asset Management Tool

Enterprises can use the "Financial Asset Management" function to allocate and recover funds and credit limits between main and linked accounts that have established financial relationships, batch manage invoice information for linked accounts, and batch set resource sharing to linked accounts.