Scopes Overview

Last updated: October 22, 2026

What Are Scopes?

Scopes allow organizations to model financial ownership more granularly than a single cloud account. Scopes enable Kion to report on, budget for, and enforce spend at a level lower than the cloud service provider (CSP) account.

Scopes are designed for organizations with shared or “whale” accounts, where multiple applications, teams, or cost centers operate within the same CSP account but need to be managed independently.

Many organizations cannot easily break shared cloud accounts into multiple accounts due to time, effort, or architectural constraints. This creates challenges around:

  • Ownership visibility

  • Budgeting and enforcement

  • Showback and chargeback

  • Financial accountability

Scopes solve this by letting you define logical ownership boundaries using metadata and rules, rather than account structure.

This allows finance, operations, and engineering teams to manage cloud spend the way the organization actually operates, not the way the cloud account hierarchy is structured.

Key Benefits

  • Granular financial ownership within shared accounts

  • Flexible reporting beyond just tags

  • Accurate budgeting and enforcement by application, team, or cost center regardless of account setup

  • Reduced pressure to refactor account structures

  • Future-ready foundation for further Kion features to enable shared cost allocation and custom line items

Requirements and Recommendations

Prerequisites

  • An active Kion environment

  • One or more CSP accounts onboarded into Kion

  • At least one active Kion Project

  • Financial data ingestion enabled for targeted accounts

  • For heavy users of this feature, it is recommended you be on an ECS installed version of Kion to better accommodate the resources needed for this feature.

Scope Eligibility and Constraints

  • A Scope must be associated with an active Kion Project

  • A Project:

    • May contain only Scopes

    • May contain Scopes and Accounts

  • A Scope must target at least one CSP account

  • A Scope can target multiple CSP accounts

  • Scopes support start dates, similar to Projects and Accounts

  • Scopes are not supported for Spend Plans, and spend may be incorrect across OUs when using both Scopes and Spend Plans.

  • Savings Opportunities do not apply to Scopes and will still apply to accounts on the Project

Permissions and Access

  • Scopes are typically managed by FinOps Managers or Kion Administrators. Users can manage Scopes with the “Manage Scopes” permission.

  • All users may be impacted, as Scopes affect:

    • Spend visibility

    • Budgets

    • Enforcements

  • Users can only see Scope data permitted by their existing Kion roles for the Projects they have access to