Stop letting AWS credits disappear into the noise.
FinOps Center automatically surfaces every AWS promotion code from your billing data and gives your team a governed workflow to allocate credits where they belong — before they expire unused.
Credits show up in your CUR. They don't show up on anyone's radar.
The Problem
AWS issues credits through promotion codes — for migrations, pilots, partner programs, and support commitments. But in a multi-account environment, those credits show up buried in your Cost and Usage Report, applied to a specific account, with no connection to the workload or business unit that earned them.
Most teams either miss them entirely, or spend hours manually reconciling credits against their cost allocation hierarchy. And if credits go unallocated, finance loses the ability to reflect those offsets in the right budget.
How It Works
Three steps from detection to allocation.
FinOps Center reads your CUR daily and automatically detects new AWS promotion codes as they appear. Every identified credit is surfaced in the Credit Management queue — no manual hunting required.
Select the credit
Choose from the queue of unallocated promotion codes. FinOps Center shows you the promotion code, the AWS account it was applied to, and its status — so you always know what's waiting for action.
Enter the details
Record the actual credit amount issued by AWS, the credit end date, and an optional reference note (like a MAP contract ID or partner agreement). The credit issue date is auto-calculated from your CUR data — one less thing to look up.
Assign to your cost hierarchy
Map the credit to the right place in your organization — all the way down to the Business Unit, Department, Portfolio, and Product level. Once allocated, the credit offsets costs at the correct level of your hierarchy in every report.
Every credit accounted for. Every offset in the right place.
Sees the right net costs — credits are reflected at the correct budget level, not pooled at the billing level.
Get proper credit for the offsets they earned — MAP credits, pilot programs, partner agreements — all attributed correctly.
Nothing expires unnoticed. The Credit Management queue surfaces every unallocated promotion code before it's too late to act.
Feature Highlights
Automatic credit detection from CUR — no manual imports
Full 4-level hierarchy allocation (Business → Department → Portfolio → Product)
Credit end date tracking with status indicators
Optional reference field for contract and partner traceability
Allocated credits table with Used, Remaining, and Period visibility
Works entirely within your AWS account — billing data never leaves your environment
Technical Architecture
How Credit Management works under the hood — from CUR scan through to live balance reporting.
Nightly Credit Detection
A scheduled Lambda function scans your Cost and Usage Report for credit line items — specifically CUR records where the charge type indicates a promotion code has been applied to an account. When a new promotion code is detected, the Lambda calculates the credit issue date as CUR date minus one day (reflecting when AWS actually issued the credit) and writes a new record to the Credits table in DynamoDB, keyed on the promotion code and the AWS account it was applied to.
Storage & Hierarchy Aggregation
Each credit record stores the promotion code, the account it was applied to, the credit period, and — once allocated — the full element map representing the four-level cost hierarchy it has been assigned to. The element map aligns with the same hierarchy used across all other FinOps Center allocation tables, so credits participate in the same aggregation logic as claimed and shared costs. A credit allocated to a Department-level node is correctly rolled up through Portfolio and Business Unit without any additional configuration.
Budget Balance Calculation
Once a credit is allocated and the element map is written, FinOps Center aggregates it against the corresponding budget node at query time. The Allocated Credits view surfaces three key figures: the total Amount (the actual AWS credit value), the Used amount (the portion consumed against actual spend in the period), and the Remaining balance. Net cost figures in dashboards and reports reflect credit offsets at the correct budget level.
Credit Consumption: First-In, First-Out
When a business unit has multiple active credits — from different promotion codes, MAP agreements, or partner programs — FinOps Center applies a first-in, first-out consumption model. The credit with the earliest issue date is drawn down against actual spend first. A credit issued in January and expiring in June gets consumed before a credit issued in March expiring in December — so near-expiry credits are never left idle while newer ones absorb spend. Once a credit is fully consumed, the next in the queue begins automatically.
Current Month Impact Tracking
Because the credit issue date is captured at the point of detection — not the point of allocation — FinOps Center correctly attributes credits to the billing period in which they were issued. When a credit issued on March 31st is allocated on April 5th, the system uses the stored issue date to place it in March. Month-end close and period-over-period reporting always reflects credits in the right billing period, and your current month view shows an accurate picture of outstanding unallocated credits affecting this month's net spend.
Ready to stop leaving AWS credits on the table?
FinOps Center deploys in minutes from AWS Marketplace. Credit detection starts on the first CUR refresh.