Prepare your Entra data

The Platform reads a set of Microsoft Entra ID user attributes and turns them into cost-allocation views. This page shows which attributes it reads, how to format each one, and what you can see once they are maintained. Use it to decide what to clean up in your tenant during or after onboarding.

Why attribute quality decides what you see

Every attribute below becomes an axis you can group license cost by: department, cost center, division, office, or legal entity.

Two behaviors are worth knowing before you start:

• An axis appears as soon as a single user carries a value. If 30 of 900 users have a cost center, the Platform shows a cost-center view in which the remaining spend sits in an Unknown bucket. Partial maintenance looks worse than none.
• Nothing is inferred. The Platform never guesses a department from a job title or a cost center from a group membership. It withholds a recommendation instead of deriving one from absent data.

Completeness matters more than the number of attributes. Finish one attribute before you start the next.

The Platform reads all attributes on this page through User.Read.All, which you grant in onboarding Step 3. Directory.Read.All also covers it. See Permissions. Maintaining the attributes is a change in your tenant only. The Platform holds no write access.

Required attributes

These three carry the base analysis. With all three complete, most of the allocation value is available.

• usageLocation
  • Where: Users → Properties → Settings → Usage location
  • Format: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, two characters, for example CH
  • Used for: country breakdown and regional license logic. It takes precedence over the free-text country field.
• department
  • Where: Users → Properties → Job information → Department
  • Format: one value, no combinations, for example Finance
  • Used for: the default axis of every cost view. It is always displayed, maintained or not.
• employeeOrgData.costCenter
  • Where: Job information → Cost center
  • Format: one code scheme, applied consistently, for example CC-4711
  • Used for: chargeback per cost center instead of a per-head split.

An alternative to the cost center field

If your cost centers already live in an on-premises AD extension attribute, use that instead. See Extension attributes. Pick one location and fill it completely instead of maintaining both partially.

Recommended attributes

Maintain these only where your organization structure gives them a clear meaning. An attribute filled with ambiguous values produces an axis without a statement.

The six recommended attributes and when each is worth maintaining

• employeeOrgData.division (Job information → Division): worth maintaining when you group departments into business units. Gives a rollup one level above department.
• companyName (Job information → Company name): worth maintaining when several legal entities share one tenant. Separates cost per entity.
• officeLocation (Job information → Office location): worth maintaining when you report at a finer grain than country. Gives a site-level cost view.
• employeeType (Job information → Employee type): worth maintaining when you distinguish permanent staff, temporary staff, and contractors. Enables role-appropriate license profiles, such as frontline versus knowledge worker.
• employeeId (Job information → Employee ID): worth maintaining when your HR system holds a stable personnel code. Gives a stable anchor for profile comparison across name changes.
• jobTitle (Job information → Job title): worth maintaining when titles follow a consistent naming scheme. Allows comparison of similar roles in user profiling.

Extension attributes

Many organizations have kept a cost center, company code, or business area in extensionAttribute1 through extensionAttribute15 in on-premises Active Directory for years. The Platform reads all 15 slots, so you don't need to restructure anything.

In the Platform, you select the slot your tenant uses from a dropdown and give it a readable label. For example, ext5 becomes Cost center and appears under that name in every cost view. You can group spelling variants of the same value afterwards, without a re-sync.

What to watch for:

• One purpose per slot. A slot that holds a cost center for some users and a site for others cannot be used as an axis.
• Document which slot means what. An undocumented slot stops being maintained after the next staff change.

Cloud-only users have no portal field for these

Microsoft Entra Connect fills the 15 slots from your on-premises directory. Users that exist only in the cloud have no field for them in the Entra admin center. Populate those through Microsoft Graph or PowerShell, or the slots stay empty for exactly those users.

Formatting rules

The Platform takes your values as they are. That is deliberate, because it invents no mapping. It also means spelling variants become separate cost buckets.

Rule	Not this	This	Otherwise
Casing is significant	Finance, finance, FINANCE	Finance throughout	Three buckets for one department
One value per field	Finance/HR	The applicable value per user	A Finance/HR bucket that appears in no other total
No additions inside the value	CC-100 (Sales)	CC-100	The same code appears in several variants
One code scheme	4711 and CC-4711 mixed	CC-4711 throughout	One cost center reported as two
ISO 3166-1 country codes	Switzerland	CH	Microsoft rejects the value and the field stays empty
Closed vocabulary for employee type	external, External, Freelancer	Employee, Contractor, Temporary	No reliable split of license profiles

Empty fields are not an error, but they are visible. Users without a value land in the Unknown bucket. Your tenant issues no warning. The effect shows up in the cost view.

Suggested order

1. Set usageLocation for every user. Lowest effort, highest effect, and Microsoft validates the format for you.
2. Fill department for every user. Agree the list of permitted department names first, then apply it.
3. Maintain the cost center in one place. Use either the Entra Cost center field or one extension attribute slot.
4. Add employeeType. This lets role-appropriate recommendations apply, such as cheaper profiles for staff without a fixed workstation.
5. Feed the attributes from your HR system through Microsoft Entra Connect. Manual maintenance in the portal drifts within months.

See also

• Permissions: the read scopes that make these attributes available to the Platform
• Onboarding guide: where attribute review fits in the sequence