Business Units

Learn how to use Business Units in North.Cloud's Cost Streams.

Understanding Business Units (BUs), Budgets, and Cohorts

Business Units (BUs) are flexible, top-level entities within North's Cost Streams designed to represent teams, departments, regions, or any organizational grouping that needs to be accountable for cloud spend. By organizing your cost allocation around BUs, you create clear, actionable ownership of costs throughout your business.

Budgets and AI-Powered Budget Status

You can create separate budgets for each BU. North also provides an AI-assigned budget, which analyzes your historical spend and trends to recommend the most realistic and effective budget threshold for each unit. Budgets have a real-time status indicator:

• 🟢 Green: On budget — your spend is tracking at or below the threshold.

• 🟡 Yellow: Close to exceeding budget — spending pace suggests you may go over unless adjustments are made.

• 🔴 Red: Over budget — the current rate will cause your costs to exceed the assigned budget.

These statuses help you proactively manage spend, receive early warnings, and prevent surprises before they impact your bottom line.

Cohorts: Shared Ownership Across the Platform

In addition to BUs, you can assign cohorts—global groups of users or stakeholders from anywhere in your organization—to own, monitor, or be accountable for the costs and budgets of particular units, projects, or streams. Cohorts provide cross-functional visibility and shared responsibility, making it easy to collaborate on cost management across departments or teams.

Showback

Showback Statements for Business Units

Showback statements let you transparently report cloud costs by Business Unit (BU), helping drive accountability and foster fiscal awareness across your organization. With North, showback can be manually created and shared for any BU.

Showback is always generated at the Business Unit level. Individual Coststreams or other sub-units cannot receive showback statements—only entire BUs are eligible.

How to Generate and Share a Showback Statement

1. Navigate to your Business Unit: Open the BU you wish to create a showback statement for in your North dashboard.

2. Click the Showback Icon at the bottom right corner of the Business Unit view, locate and click the showback statement icon.

3. Download