FinOps Foundation's Focus 1.2 Expands to SaaS, PaaS

SAN DIEGO — At FinOps X, the FinOps Foundation‘s annual get-together, the Foundation announced the release of FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification (FOCUS) version 1.2.

This latest version marks a significant leap forward in standardizing cloud cost management, introducing support for Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) billing data, invoice-level reconciliation, and multicurrency normalization.

The enhancements position FOCUS as the unified billing format for today’s increasingly complex “Cloud+” environments, where organizations manage costs across a mix of cloud, SaaS, and other technology platforms.

It may not be sexy, but automating and managing billing across the ever-growing world of cloud technology is vital for business. Without FinOp optimizing cloud spending and aligning cloud costs with business objectives, it’s all too easy for your company to burn money.

In 2023, only 28% of respondents in a FinOps Foundation survey said their organization can accurately budget and forecast its cloud costs.

Worse still, according to Flexera’s 2025 State of Cloud Report, 27% of cloud spending is wasted by being spent on unused, underutilized, or forgotten resources. That’s no way for a company to manage its cash flow.

Fortunately, companies have realized they must get a better grip on their cloud spend. It’s no wonder, as J.R. Storment, Executive Director of the FinOps Foundation, pointed out in his keynote, that FinOps has grown from a handful of practitioners in 2019 to over 56 thousand today who manage over half of global cloud spending.

The 1.2 release unifies reporting for FinOps practitioners by integrating SaaS and PaaS billing data into the same schema as core cloud spend. This means organizations can now analyze all technology costs, across public cloud, SaaS, and PaaS, using a single dashboard or SQL query, reducing the risk of duplicate charges and simplifying financial reporting.

Moving FinOps beyond cloud spending, a new concept has also been introduced: Scopes. In a keynote, Anthony T.J. Johnson, MGM Resorts’ Lead Architect of Platform Economics, explained how MGM works with public and private clouds, SaaS, and communications using FinOps concepts.

FinOps for the Cloud

With health checks on all scopes, MGM FinOps managers can help the company manage both its business and technology strategies effectively and on budget. In short, FinOps is growing from the cloud to other cloud-related areas such as data centers and, of course, AI.

Other notable updates include:

• Invoice-Level Reconciliation: A new invoice ID column links each billing line item directly to provider invoices, streamlining chargebacks and month-end close processes.
• Granular Cost Allocation: Enhanced schema with billing account and sub-account granularity for more precise cost allocation.
• Multi-Currency Normalization: The ability to convert mixed-currency datasets into a single currency with auditable exchange rates, aiding budgeting and profit-and-loss analysis.
• Expanded Provider Support: Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Grafana have announced support for FOCUS 1.2, joining AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Oracle Cloud, which already support FOCUS.

According to Storment, rapid SaaS adoption and the growth of multi-cloud environments have driven this unified billing standard. “As organizations increasingly manage complex, multicloud and SaaS-heavy environments, FOCUS 1.2 delivers the standardization they need to understand, allocate, and optimize spend across more technology platforms.”

FOCUS, now in its third year, has achieved wide adoption among cloud providers and FinOps tool vendors. Major industry players, including AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and now Alibaba Cloud, Databricks, and Grafana, are actively supporting the specification. Organizations worldwide are leveraging FOCUS-compliant billing datasets to drive business insights and optimize technology spend across diverse environments.

The FinOps Foundation’s recent membership expansion, which includes American Express, NVIDIA, AMD, ServiceNow, and Snowflake, reflects the growing importance of cost management beyond public cloud to areas such as AI, SaaS, and private cloud. The Foundation’s updated framework now recognizes these broader “Cloud+” scopes as central to modern FinOps practice.

With FOCUS 1.2, the FinOps Foundation aims to further reduce complexity for practitioners, enabling faster, more accurate financial analysis and supporting the next wave of cloud and SaaS adoption. As more providers and vendors adopt the standard, industry experts expect FOCUS to become the backbone of cloud cost management in the years ahead.

FOCUS 1.2 is not a finished project. The FinOps Foundation plans to release FOCUS 1.3 by the end of the year.