Meridian is being built to ingest FOCUS-formatted billing data and produce what the standard does not: accountable attribution, suspense, journal entries, accruals, and a tie-out to the books.
The FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification is an open specification for normalizing technology billing data across cloud, SaaS, platform, and AI services. It is maintained as a Joint Development Foundation project under the FinOps Foundation and defines common columns, terminology, and minimum requirements for billing-data generators.
The Foundation currently lists AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Snowflake, Databricks, MongoDB, Vercel, and other providers with FOCUS-format support at different specification versions. Meridian's planned import scope begins at the hyperscaler emission floor: the Cost and Usage dataset, version 1.2 and later.
FOCUS 1.2 added support for virtual-currency economics: provider-defined units such as credits, tokens, and DBUs, with pricing and conversion context. That gives billing systems a common way to carry the purchase, consumption, burn-down, and rate context increasingly used by SaaS, data platforms, and AI services.
FOCUS 1.4, ratified June 4, 2026, added Invoice Detail and Billing Period datasets and invoice-reconciliation guidance. Those additions move normalized usage closer to the finance office, but they do not replace attribution ownership or the general ledger.
| FOCUS gives you | Meridian adds |
|---|---|
| Normalized billed and effective cost | Agent, workflow, owner, and department attribution |
| Provider, service, account, and tag dimensions | Reviewed mappings and visible suspense for unresolved rows |
| Charge periods and invoice linkage | Accruals, chargeback journal entries, and close controls |
| Portable cost and usage terminology | A subledger that reconciles to source bills and the GL |
Explore the detailed vocabulary in the Agent FinOps Glossary.
FOCUS 1.2 added pricing-currency requirements for provider-defined units such as credits, tokens, and DBUs. A provider can use those fields to report purchases, consumption, burn-down, and conversion to billing currency; coverage still depends on what that provider emits.
Normalization is the first step. Finance must still map rows to agents, owners, departments, accounts, and dimensions; place unresolved amounts in suspense; approve a balanced chargeback; and reconcile the resulting entry to the source and general ledger.
BilledCost is the amount billed for the record in billing currency. EffectiveCost represents its amortized economic cost after applicable commitment purchases or discounts, so it can differ from the invoice-timing view.
