An enterprise runs workloads for multiple business units—such as Finance, Human Resources, and Marketing—within a single Azure subscription. The accounting team requires a method to categorize and track cloud spending by department so they can generate accurate internal chargeback reports in Microsoft Cost Management without redesigning their subscription structure. Which Azure feature should the organization use to allocate and filter resource costs by department?

Resource tags: ### What Resource Tags Are **Azure resource tags** are user-defined **metadata elements** structured as **key-value pairs** (such as `Department : Marketing` or `CostCenter : 10450`) applied directly to Azure resources, resource groups, or subscriptions. ### How It Meets the Cost Allocation Requirement Resource tags provide the contextual business taxonomy necessary to categorize and aggregate spending. When resources generate usage data, the associated **tag keys and values** are appended to the billing telemetry. Within **Microsoft Cost Management**, financial teams can filter and group spending data based on specific tag keys, allowing them to track consumption per business unit without having to create separate subscriptions or move resources. ### Key Advantages and Capabilities * **Granular cost tracking**: Enables grouping and filtering of usage and billing metrics across diverse resource types and locations. * **Organizational flexibility**: Allows custom taxonomy across dimensions like **environment**, **department**, **owner**, or **project code**. * **Billing report integration**: Directly populates into downloadable usage files and invoices for easy accounting reconciliation. * **Tag inheritance support**: Works with Cost Management features to pass billing profile or subscription tags down to child usage records. ### Why This Is Optimal Using **resource tags** is the standard, most cost-effective method for enabling organizational chargeback and budgeting within a shared subscription model, avoiding the administrative overhead of deploying separate management hierarchies solely for cost accounting.