Map your cloud spend to purchase orders for Microsoft Marketplace

Purchase order allocations help organizations associate Azure and Marketplace spend with purchase orders for tracking, budgeting, and invoice reconciliation. Create allocations through mappings, which determine which purchases, products, software companies, or spending categories are associated with a purchase order.

How mappings work

Creating a purchase order doesn't automatically associate charges with it. To allocate spend, create one or more mappings.

  • A purchase order can align to multiple mappings.
  • Mappings have different scopes and effective dates to allocate spending with purchase orders.
  • You can create, modify, activate, or deactivate mappings as business requirements change.
  • When a Marketplace charge matches an active mapping, it gets allocated to the corresponding purchase order.

Mapping precedence

In some scenarios, a Marketplace charge might match more than one allocation mapping to your purchase orders. When this occurs, the most specific mapping takes precedence.

For example:

  • A publisher allocation maps all purchases from Contoso Software with Purchase Order A.
  • A product allocation maps the Contoso Analytics product with Purchase Order B.

Charges for Contoso Analytics are allocated to Purchase Order B because the product mapping is more specific. Other purchases from Contoso Software continue to be allocated to Purchase Order A.

Note

The publisher of a Marketplace product might differ from the reseller or services partner selling you the product. When creating publisher or product allocations, enter the publisher and product IDs, not the name of the reseller.

Create mapping

You can create broad mappings, such as all Marketplace purchases, or more specific mappings for individual software companies or products. Set up mapping during the process of creating a purchase order in the Azure portal, or after.

  1. Go to Cost Management + Billing in the Azure portal.
  2. Navigate to your Billing scopes and select the scope you need.
  3. Navigate to your Billing profile and select the relevant profile.
  4. Under Invoice management select Purchase orders.
  5. Select New mapping.
  6. In Map to, choose the scope of spending you want to allocate to a purchase order.
  7. Under PO name search and select the purchase order to which you want to apply this mapping.
  8. Select an Effective date in UTC.
  9. Select an Expiration date in UTC.
  10. The default Status is set to Active. Setting status to inactive will allow you to create a mapping, but it will not be used to allocate spend toward the purchase order until you activate it.
  11. When mapping to a publisher, the publisher ID is required.
  12. When mapping to a Marketplace product, both the publisher ID and offer ID are required. The system will validate these IDs match an available product.
  13. Select Create. You should see a green banner indicating mapping was successfully created.

Note

By default, new mapping will only apply for future charges between the effective date and expiration date, during which the mapping status is active. You can apply this mapping to previously invoiced charges using the Reapply mappings feature described below.

Mapping scopes

The mapping scope determines how you allocate spending to your purchase order. The following list shows scopes from broadest to most narrow:

General spending category inclusive of both Azure and Microsoft Marketplace

  • All purchases
  • All entitlements
  • All consumption

Microsoft products excluding Marketplace

  • All Microsoft products
  • All Microsoft entitlements
  • All Microsoft consumption

Marketplace products from Microsoft partners

  • All Marketplace products
  • All Marketplace entitlements
  • All Marketplace consumption

Marketplace publishers and products

  • Specific publishers (requires publisher ID)
  • Specific Marketplace products (requires publisher ID and offer ID)

Note

Marketplace products can include both entitlements and consumption, such as a SaaS or Container product with a monthly or annual fee plus usage-based charges.

Common allocation strategies

Separate purchase orders for Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Marketplace

Organizations often separate their Azure infrastructure spending from third-party software spending with trusted Microsoft partners.

To implement this strategy:

  1. Create two purchase orders.
  2. Create one mapping for all Microsoft products allocating spend to a purchase order for Azure.
  3. Create a second mapping for all Marketplace products allocating spend to a second purchase order for Marketplace.

Separate purchase orders by software company

Finance and procurement teams might issue separate purchase orders for each software vendor. Create publisher mappings to allocate all spending with that vendor to your purchase order. You can map multiple publishers to a single purchase order.

Separate purchase orders by products

Organizations that require the most detailed financial tracking can create product-level mappings for one or more Marketplace solutions. You can map multiple products from one or more publishers to a single purchase order.

Edit mapping

You can edit mapping as organizational requirements evolve. Common reasons for editing mapping include:

  • New software purchases
  • Budget ownership changes
  • Procurement policy changes
  • Business reorganizations
  • Correcting mistakes

You edit mapping from the Purchase orders page.

  1. Select the All mappings tab.
  2. Sort the table by field columns and use available filters to quickly find the mapping you want to edit.
  3. Select the Edit mappings button above the table on the right.
  4. You can edit individual fields within the All mappings table. A pencil icon indicates editable fields, including:
    • PO name
    • Status
    • Effective date
    • Expiration date

Bulk edit mapping

To apply the same changes across multiple mappings, you can choose a field from the drop-down menu under select a field to bulk edit, choose the value you want and then select Apply.

A few tips for bulk editing:

  • Once you've started to edit fields individually within the table, the bulk edit feature becomes disabled. Submit or cancel your current edits to reenable bulk editing.
  • You cannot edit the PO name for a mapping with status inactive. First change the status to active and submit. Then you will be able allocate the mapping to different purchase order.
  • Mapping dates must fall within the effective and expiration dates of the purchase order you want to assign it. You'll receive an error if dates are misaligned.
  • The Updated time column displays the timestamp, in your local time, of the last submitted change to each mapping.

Important

Submitted changes to mapping affect how future charges are allocated to purchase orders and may also be applied toward recent charges if you reapply mappings.

Reapply mappings

Use Reapply mappings to systematically reevaluate previously invoiced charges using your current mapping configuration, inclusive of any recent edits. This step can be useful when:

  • You create a mapping after incurring charges
  • You change a mapping after receiving an invoice
  • You need to correct a mistake or allocations for a purchase order

To apply the latest configured updates to mappings:

  1. Select the Reapply mappings button at the top of the Purchase orders page.
  2. Select the Start date and End date to define a previous date range for which you want to apply the latest mappings. You can choose dates from the most recent three months.
  3. Choose Submit to start the process.

Warning

Reapplying mappings can affect historical purchase order allocations, affect recent invoices, and regenerate new supplemental documents. Review the impact carefully before proceeding.

When you initiate a mapping reapplication

  • You'll see a message and progress bar indicating "your mapping reapplication has started".
  • The system reevaluates previously processed charges.
  • Purchase order allocations can change.
  • Supplemental documents are updated for affected invoices.
  • The process can affect historical periods within the supported date range.
  • Once completed, you'll receive a message that "mapping successfully reevaluated" including a list of impacted invoices and the amount of applicable charges.

Important

For Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers, remapping can result in Microsoft rebilling your account. You'll receive both a new invoice and updated supplemental documents with the new invoice numbers. Previously issued invoices affected will be voided. For Microsoft Customer Agreement, you will only receive updated supplemental documents. No rebilling occurs and previously issued invoices will not be affected.

Next step

Enable supplement documents to support invoice reconciliation

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