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Bill AI spend back to the teams that incur it

Enterprise Tier

As long as AI spend arrives as one opaque org-wide invoice, the operator owns every question about it. Chargeback moves the accountability to the teams that incur the cost, and showback at least makes the cost visible to them; both start with the same artifact, a per-user and per-team consumption statement exported into whatever financial system the organisation already runs.

The reports here read from the same Usage Analytics breakdowns used to set the ceilings in Keep each team's spend inside an agreed ceiling. Reporting presents spend; export moves that spend out of Agent Router for chargeback (billing each business unit for its own consumption) or showback (reporting that consumption without moving money).

Persona: Platform operator working in the Admin Dashboard, in partnership with the finance and business owners who consume the reports.

Estimated time: 15--20 minutes per reporting cycle once the budgets and the group-to-team mapping are in place.

Outcomes​

By the end of this guide:

  • A user- or team-based consumption report has been produced and read against the budgets it is measured against.
  • That report has been exported in a form suitable for chargeback or showback in a downstream finance or billing system.

Prerequisites​

Step 1: Produce user- and team-based consumption reports​

  1. Open Usage Analytics and set the time range to the reporting period, the closed billing cycle for a monthly statement.
  2. Select the By User breakdown for a per-person statement, or the team view for a per-business-function statement.
  3. Sort by cost descending so that the largest consumers sit at the top, which is the order most reviews want to read in.
  4. Review the figures against the budgets that were set for each user and team. A consumption report read next to the ceiling it was measured against is far more useful than either in isolation.

A consumption report is a point-in-time statement of what was spent; a budget is the ceiling it is measured against. Presenting them together (spend, ceiling, and the gap between them, per user and per team) is what turns raw usage data into something a business owner can act on. For the combined investigation pattern, where an unexpected line item in a report is traced back to the change that caused it, the spot-the-anomaly-then-find-the-cause workflow in Audit Agent Router activity is the companion surface.

Step 2: Export data for chargeback and showback​

Chargeback and showback both depend on getting the spend data out of Agent Router and into whatever financial system the organisation already runs.

  1. Apply the time range and the user or team breakdown that match the chargeback period and the cost-centre structure.
  2. Use the Export function to download the filtered data, typically as CSV.
  3. Load the exported file into the billing, finance, or reporting system that owns the chargeback or showback process.

The exported rows carry the dimensions chargeback needs (user, cost, token totals, and the period they cover) in a form a downstream system can join to its own cost-centre records. Agent Router's role ends at producing accurate, attributable data; the allocation of that data to ledgers and the decision to charge or merely to show belongs to the finance process consuming it. For organisations that need always-on cost dashboards rather than a periodic export, see Get alerted to cost spikes as they happen.

What to do next​

Where to go next

Know what every app and project actually costs

Add an app or project axis when user and team do not match the cost centres.

Keep each team's spend inside an agreed ceiling

The ceilings these consumption reports are measured against.