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Reporting on last month’s cloud invoice answers the same three questions every time: what happened, why did costs go up, and where are the anomalies. The format changes (Notion, PowerPoint, Slack) but the work does not. It usually falls to a senior SRE or infrastructure lead and pulls them off engineering work. Costory cuts that monthly report from half a day to minutes. This guide automates monthly with a Cost digest inside Cost Reports.

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Prerequisites

  • Your cloud billing data is connected to Costory (see Quickstart).
  • Optionally, events (deploys, incidents, provider changes) are connected so the AI can reference them in its explanations.

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What you get

  • A scheduled Cost Report whose body includes a Cost digest tree of the biggest movers.
  • AI-generated explanations for significant changes when Enable AI investigation is on.
  • Delivery to Slack or email, plus Summary, Tree, and Table views in the Costory UI.

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How to automate monthly cost reporting step by step

1

Create a monthly Cost Report

Open Reports, create a report, and set parameters for the month you care about. Typical setup: Metric = Cost, Group By = Provider, comparison = last full month.
Costory report builder for a monthly Cost digest

Report builder with a Cost digest tree preview

2

Add a Cost digest element

Click + Add Element, choose Cost digest, then add dimensions such as Environment and Service Name. Turn on Enable AI investigation so leaf nodes get root-cause text after delivery. Details: Digest.
Cost digest configuration for a monthly review

Cost digest element with additional dimensions, thresholds, and AI investigation

3

Schedule Slack or email delivery

Set the report to monthly, add finance or leadership destinations, and save. Recipients get the Summary narrative. You can reopen the run in Costory and switch to Tree or Table for drill-down.
Monthly Schedule and send settings for a Cost digest report

Schedule and send for a monthly Cost digest

To put this on autopilot from chat, ask the Costory MCP to “schedule a monthly cost digest to my leadership channel on the first Tuesday of each month.”

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Next steps

  • Add context to your reports: Connect events (deploys, incidents, provider changes) so Costory AI can reference them in its explanations.
  • Relate costs to usage: Import usage metrics to show that cost increases track with business growth. See Relate Costs to Usage.
  • Share per-team reports: Scope a digest with dimension filters and send each squad their own channel. See Decentralize FinOps.
Last modified on August 7, 2026