Azure account

By the end of this stage you have a working Azure subscription, you know how Azure organizes everything you will create, and you have a budget alert watching your spend. If you already use Azure at work, skim this page and move on to the CLI.

This is where the Azure deep dive starts. Everything in the next four stages is transferable knowledge. The same account, CLI, and provisioning patterns apply whether you are extracting invoices or deploying any other workload.

Create the account

New Azure customers can currently start with a free account that includes a $200 credit for up to 30 days, plus a set of services that stay free within monthly limits. Eligibility and offer terms change, so check the official page rather than trusting a tutorial screenshot: azure.microsoft.com/pricing/purchase-options/azure-account.

You need a Microsoft account and a credit card for identity verification. The card is not charged during the free trial unless you explicitly upgrade to pay-as-you-go.

The $200 credit is more than enough for this project. The Document Intelligence tier we use is free, and the complete 13-document model evaluation costs about $0.44 in Azure OpenAI tokens. You will see the exact math in the evaluation stage.

How Azure organizes things

Azure has a strict hierarchy, and knowing it makes everything else less confusing:

• A tenant is your organization's identity boundary. Users and permissions live here. Signing up created one for you.
• A subscription is a billing boundary inside the tenant. Your free credit is attached to one subscription. Companies often run separate subscriptions for dev and production.
• A resource group is a folder inside a subscription. It groups resources that live and die together.
• A resource is the actual thing, a Document Intelligence endpoint, a model deployment, a container app.

This is what the hierarchy looks like once the project is fully provisioned:

The resource group is the level you will care about most. Everything this project creates goes into one resource group, which means one command deletes the entire footprint when you are done. That is the cleanup story, and it is why you should never dump unrelated experiments into the same group.

Find your way around the portal

Log in at portal.azure.com and find three things:

1. Subscriptions, confirm your subscription exists and is active
2. Resource groups, empty for now
3. Cost Management, where spend and forecasts live

We will do almost all provisioning from the CLI in the next stage, but the portal stays useful for inspecting what exists and reading dashboards.

Set a budget alert

Do this before creating any resource. In Cost Management, create a budget on your subscription (for example €20 per month) with an email alert at 80%. Forgotten cloud resources are the classic way a learning project turns into a surprise bill, and an alert costs nothing.

Checkpoint

• You can log into the Azure portal and see an active subscription
• A budget alert exists on the subscription
• You can explain the difference between a subscription, a resource group, and a resource

Next: Azure CLI

Install the CLI, sign in, and create the resource group everything else lives in.