A FinOps (Financial Operations) project is a dedicated Google Cloud project used to centralize all billing-related tools, APIs, data exports, and dashboards. By isolating billing management in one project, you gain better access control, auditability, and visibility into the cost of financial governance itself.
📋 Steps to Set Up a FinOps Project
- Create a New Project: In the Google Cloud Console, create a new project (e.g., name it “FinOps” or “Billing Admin Project”). You’ll need the Organization Project Creator role.
- Link to a Billing Account: Attach your organization’s primary billing account to this project (either during creation or via Billing > Change billing).
- Enable Necessary APIs: Inside this project, enable the following:
- BigQuery API – for storing and querying billing data.
- BigQuery Data Transfer Service API – for exporting SKU pricing data.
- Cloud Billing Budget API – for automating budget alerts.
- Other tools as needed (e.g., Cloud Functions, Looker Studio APIs).
- Set Up Billing Export: Go to the Billing Export settings for your billing account. Export data to a BigQuery dataset inside your FinOps project (e.g., FinOps:BillingExport).
- Create Budgets and Reports: Use this project to manage budgets and create Looker Studio dashboards using the exported billing data. This keeps cost governance centralized.
- Manage Access with IAM: Assign roles to finance or engineering teams:
- BigQuery Data Viewer or Editor on the dataset.
- Billing Account Viewer at the billing account level for console visibility.
- Limit project Owner/Editor roles to FinOps team only.
- Segregate FinOps Costs: All costs related to billing exports, queries, and tooling (e.g., Cloud Functions) will be billed to this FinOps project. This creates visibility into your cost management overhead.
🎯 Benefits of a FinOps Project
- Centralized Control: All billing exports, APIs, and dashboards live in one project — making policy management simple and secure.
- Clean Access Boundaries: Finance teams can access just the FinOps dataset without needing access to every product/project.
- API Isolation: You don’t clutter production environments with billing APIs or risk someone disabling BigQuery used for export.
- Dedicated Tooling Space: Host FinOps scripts, dashboards, or third-party cost tools safely within this one project.
- Cost Visibility: You can measure and optimize the operational cost of your FinOps efforts (e.g., BigQuery query usage).
📌 Example Use Case
Your company has 100 GCP projects. Instead of giving finance access to each one, you create a project called Org-Billing. You export billing data from all projects into this FinOps project. Finance has read-only access to the dataset and can run reports or visualize the data in Looker Studio. This gives them complete cost visibility without needing access to production resources.
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🕓 Last Updated: April 2025