Skip to main content

​
Chargeback and showback

Showback and chargeback are two maturity stages of the same allocation work, not two separate features. Showback is the read-only, ongoing view of who’s spending what (see Cost explorer and allocation for that side — the Operations page). Chargeback is the periodic event: turning a period’s allocated spend into records finance can actually use to bill internal teams.

​
Read this before you graduate to chargeback

Most cost-allocation programs move from showback to chargeback once allocation coverage — the share of spend attributable to a team or cost center — crosses roughly 90%. Moving earlier is one of the most common reasons a FinOps program loses credibility in its first year: a chargeback invoice with a large “unallocated” line gets disputed the moment finance sees it, and one disputed invoice in month one sets the whole program back by quarters. The Chargeback page shows that same coverage number for the period you’re about to run, computed against the exact date range the chargeback trigger uses. It’s a soft gate — a visible warning below the readiness threshold, not a button that refuses to run. TensorCost doesn’t hard-block a chargeback run on low coverage; that’s a judgment call left to you.

​
What a chargeback run actually produces

Running chargeback for a period does the following, and only the following:
  1. Allocates the period’s spend across your configured dimension (team, project, environment, tag, or a custom key) using the same allocation rules that drive showback.
  2. Generates one PDF and one CSV per (dimension, member) bucket — for example, one PDF and one CSV per team.
  3. Uploads both to storage and emails them to the tenant’s admin users.
The Chargeback page gives you a run history, the per-team dollar breakdown for any run, and — the piece that used to be missing from this surface — the actual signed PDF/CSV download link and the email-sent status for each invoice, plus a way to resend one.

​
What it is not

There is no general-ledger integration anywhere in this product — no Oracle, SAP, NetSuite, or any other accounting-system connector. Running a chargeback does not move money, post a journal entry, or update anyone’s books. It produces documents. Your finance team still has to manually key the figures from the PDF or CSV into your actual ledger.
Put plainly: “chargeback” here is showback with a stronger word attached to it — a real, useful artifact for internal billing conversations, but not a system that transacts on your behalf. If your workflow needs cost data to land automatically inside a general-ledger system, that integration doesn’t exist today.

​
Team scorecard, for the weeks in between

Chargeback is a periodic (typically monthly) event. Between runs, Team scorecard is the weekly per-team view — how each team’s spend moved this week, for awareness rather than as a chargeable amount. Both pages share the same coverage gate so the three allocation surfaces — Operations, Team scorecard, and Chargeback — never disagree about how ready you are to bill anyone.