Cost Allocation & Showback Platform  ·  View 01 of 22  ·  1 · Context and scope

System Context

Who reads the number, where the spend is billed, and what the platform is never allowed to change.

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Who owns what (read only) Service catalogue CMDB Org & cost-centre system effective-dated Cluster metrics 60k workloads People who read the number Engineering lead 450 teams Product owner 28 product lines FinOps analyst policy owner Finance controller close owner Where the spend is billed AWS billing export CUR, hourly Azure Cost Management FOCUS export Google Cloud billing BigQuery export Licence & SaaS vendors 40M USD/yr Cost Allocation & Showback Platform Bill in, accountable owner out What it feeds ERP general ledger chargeback only Collaboration digest Teams Enterprise BI Power BI team bill unit cost policy statements CUR daily FOCUS daily BQ daily invoices catalogue org tree samples postings alerts marts Cost Allocation & Showback Platform — System Context External / third party Person or role synchronous batch event / async The provider is the only source of truth for what was charged. Everything this platform adds is an answer to 'by whom'. v 1.0 · owner Platform Architecture · date 2026-09

In scope

  • Ingesting and conforming billing data from three clouds plus licence and SaaS spend
  • Attributing every cost record to an accountable team, product line and cost centre
  • Apportioning shared infrastructure and amortising commitment purchases
  • Publishing a frozen monthly statement, with a deliberate later path to chargeback

Out of scope

  • Procurement, contract negotiation and commitment purchasing decisions
  • The general ledger itself — the ERP stays the book of record
  • Rate optimisation actions: the platform reports the opportunity, it never resizes a resource
  • Capitalisation, depreciation and headcount cost

Stated assumptions

  • Three clouds, ~1,200 billing scopes, ~40,000 active resources, 450 teams, 28 product lines
  • ≈ $180M/yr cloud spend and ≈ $40M/yr licence and SaaS spend
  • Provider exports land T+1 and remain mutable for weeks afterwards
  • The org and cost-centre system is the source of record for who exists
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Solution Architecture v1.0 · Microsoft Azure · Cost & Efficiency Architecture · 2026-0901-system-context