Attribution & Finance
Cost attribution
Tying each dollar of AI spend to who spent it and why — the person, team, project, or agent responsible — rather than seeing one lump sum on a provider invoice. Attribution is the difference between "we spent $40,000 on AI" and "the research team's document pipeline spent $40,000."
Example
Two teams share one provider key. The invoice says $18,000. Without attribution, nobody can say whether that's the sales team's chatbot or engineering's test harness — so nobody owns it, and nobody optimizes it.
Related terms
Chargeback
Billing each internal team for the AI spend it actually caused, moving the cost onto that team's budget. It makes teams feel their own usage, which is the fastest way to curb waste.
Showback
The lighter cousin of chargeback: showing each team what it spent without moving the money. It creates visibility and accountability without the friction of internal billing.
GL allocation
Mapping AI spend to the right lines in your general ledger — the accounting system of record — so it lands in the correct cost center, department, or project code instead of one catch-all "software" bucket.
Virtual AI Key
A governed stand-in for a raw provider API key: a key you issue per team, person, project, or agent that carries its own budget, its own limits, and full attribution — while the real provider key stays hidden. The concept mirrors the virtual credit card, where each card has its own limit and owner. (In Tokenality these are issued as tk_live_… keys.)