Attribution & Finance
Invoice reconciliation
Matching your own records of what was spent against the provider's invoice, line by line, to confirm they agree — and to catch discrepancies before you pay.
Example
Your internal ledger says $17,940 for the month; the provider invoice says $18,010. Reconciliation surfaces the $70 gap and lets you trace it — a late-posting call, a rounding difference, or a workload you didn't know about — instead of just paying the number on the bill.
Related terms
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.
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."
Append-only audit
A record that can be added to but never edited or deleted, so the history of what happened is tamper-evident. It's the difference between a log an insider can quietly rewrite and one an auditor will accept as evidence.