User Guide

Cost Allocation

Attribute every dollar to a team or cost center with tag- and subscription-based rules — then produce chargeback or showback statements.

Cost centers and rules#

Cost allocation answers "who does this spend belong to?" You define cost centers (a team, a client, a product line) and allocation rules that map spend to them:

  • ✓Tag rules — assign cost carrying a specific tag key/value (e.g. team=payments) to a cost center
  • ✓Subscription rules — assign an entire subscription or account to a cost center
  • ✓Priority ordering — rules are evaluated in order, so specific rules can override broad ones
Tip
Tag-based allocation is the most granular — it splits a shared subscription across many teams by the tags already on your resources, with no change to how you organize accounts.

Allocation coverage#

Not every dollar is tagged. CCO tracks allocation coverage — the share of spend that a rule has claimed versus what's still unallocated — so you can see how complete your chargeback is and where tagging gaps are costing you accuracy.

Drive tagging discipline
A falling coverage percentage is an early signal that new, untagged resources are being created. It's available as a notification event so you hear about it before month-end, not after.

Chargeback vs showback#

The same allocation drives both models:

  • ✓Showback — show each team what they spent, for awareness and accountability
  • ✓Chargeback — bill each team back for their spend, with a statement they can reconcile
Note
A chargeback statement states its cost basis — actual or amortized — on the page. Actual and amortized are different numbers for the same spend once reservations are involved, and a statement that doesn't say which it used can't be reconciled against an invoice.

Where allocation appears#

  • ✓Cost Allocation page — cost centers, rules, and live coverage
  • ✓Reports — the Chargeback report type exports per-cost-center statements to PDF or Excel
  • ✓Alerts & Notifications — allocation-coverage-drop event
  • ✓Dashboard — allocation coverage as a headline stat

Allocation reads the same cost data as the rest of CCO, so what you charge back reconciles with the Dashboard, Analytics, and Cost Explorer to the cent.