FOCUS Billing Analysis with SQL

Price

$89, one-time payment

Who it is for

Data engineers, cloud engineers and FinOps analysts who write SQL.

You should know

SQL with GROUP BY and joins; FOCUS basics. Some Python helps in Week 4.

You will build

A comparison query and memo, a commitment reconciliation, an anomaly notebook, a unit-economics model.

Format

Self-paced text lessons with SQL, exercises and templates. No video, no live sessions.

Time

About 10 to 12 hours over 5 weeks (author’s estimate).

Support

Questions by email to support@finopscourse.com.

Access

Lifetime access on the Google account you buy with, including lesson updates (see Terms).

Certification

None. Official exam not included ($400 from the FinOps Foundation).

Refunds

Request by email; handled under the refund policy shown at checkout.

A preview from Week 3: is that commitment actually being used?

Meridian Retail (fictional) prepaid $131,400 for a one-year Compute Savings Plan, amortized at $15.00 per hour. Five months in, a migration right-sizes the fleet to 60% of the committed capacity. BilledCost on the covered usage stays $0 the whole year, so a dashboard built on BilledCost shows nothing wrong. This query, taken from the lesson, splits the year’s EffectiveCost by CommitmentDiscountStatus:

SELECT
  "CommitmentDiscountStatus",
  ROUND(SUM("EffectiveCost")::numeric, 2) AS effective_cost
FROM focus_cost_and_usage
WHERE "CommitmentDiscountId" = 'cs-compute-2026-meridian-01'
  AND "ChargeCategory" = 'Usage'
  AND "ChargePeriodStart" >= '2026-01-01'
  AND "ChargePeriodStart" <  '2027-01-01'
GROUP BY "CommitmentDiscountStatus"
ORDER BY effective_cost DESC;

$30,660 of the prepaid $131,400 (23%) bought capacity nobody used. The lesson then reconciles all four cost columns month by month and asks you to write up what to do before the commitment renews. Numbers are synthetic and reconcile exactly: 5 months × $10,950 plus 7 months × $6,570 used, and 7 months × $4,380 unused.

Data engineers, cloud engineers and FinOps analysts who can write SQL and want hands-on practice turning FOCUS billing data into findings: cross-cloud comparisons, commitment reconciliation, anomaly detection and unit economics.

What you should already know

• Comfortable SQL: SELECT, WHERE, GROUP BY, joins, and ideally window functions.
• A rough idea of what FOCUS is and why it exists. Week 1 recaps the essentials briefly, not the whole specification.
• For Week 4 only: enough Python to read a short pandas script. You can follow the logic without running it.
• No cloud account is required. The scenario data is shown in the lessons.

It is not a FOCUS specification walkthrough for complete beginners (the Foundation’s free Introduction to FOCUS covers that), and it is not the official credential. If you need the certificate for an employer, buy the Foundation’s course and exam; this course does not include the exam.

• ✓Five written lessons, one per week, each about 2 hours including exercises. Self-paced: no live sessions and no schedule to keep.
• ✓Worked examples with SQL and the result tables they produce, interactive knowledge checks, and “try it first, then reveal” exercises.
• ✓Downloadable Markdown templates for the findings memo and the executive memo.
• ✓Your progress is saved to your account, and you can mark the course complete at the end.

Included

• ✓All 5 weekly lessons, exercises and templates.
• ✓Questions by email to support@finopscourse.com. There is no live support, cohort or community.
• ✓A completion certificate you generate yourself in the browser. It is not verified and is not a FinOps Foundation credential.

Not included

• The FinOps Foundation’s FOCUS Analyst exam or any official credential.
• Video lessons, live sessions or graded feedback on your deliverables.
• A cloud account, warehouse or real billing export.