Cost explorer and allocation
Two different questions live under “Spend” in the console: where did the money go (Explorer), and whose budget does it belong to (allocation — Operations, Team scorecard, and eventually Chargeback). This page covers both, because the second question only means anything once the first one is answered.Explorer
Explorer is the default landing page for the Spend surface — the hero number, the trend, and the breakdown a FinOps lead checks first.- A headline spend figure for the selected window, with day-over-day movement.
- A trend chart and a per-dimension breakdown, grouped by team, service, provider, or model — pick one from the group-by strip.
- A forecast-vs-budget rail comparing the trend against whichever tenant-level budget matches the selected period.
- A pivot builder for multi-dimension slices — rows, columns, and a value aggregation, not just a single group-by chip. Useful when “spend by team” isn’t enough and you need “spend by team, by model, for this quarter” in one table.
Group-by and the pivot builder both read from the same underlying dimension list, so a saved view and a group-by chip never disagree about what “team” or “model” means.
Saved views
Any pivot configuration — the rows, columns, and value aggregation you built — can be saved by name and reloaded later, or deleted when it’s no longer useful. This is what makes Explorer a reporting tool instead of a one-off query box: a FinOps lead builds “spend by team by model, this quarter” once and everyone on the team opens the same saved view going forward.Incomplete periods
Cost data for the current day (or the current period, more broadly) is always partial — the day isn’t over yet. Explorer’s comparisons account for this: a day-over-day or period-over-period comparison lines up equivalent spans (the same number of elapsed days) rather than comparing a partial “today” against a full prior period, which would otherwise read as a false collapse in spend.How spend gets attributed
Explorer answers “where did the money go” against your account/service/model structure. It does not, by itself, tell you which team or cost center is responsible for a given dollar — that’s a separate step, called allocation, and it’s the harder problem.Allocation coverage — the gating metric
The FinOps discipline for this is well established: most cost-allocation programs start with showback (a read-only view of who’s spending what) and only graduate to chargeback (billing teams for what they used) once allocation coverage — the percentage of spend that can actually be mapped to a team or cost center — crosses roughly 90%. Moving to chargeback before coverage is high enough is one of the most common ways a FinOps program loses credibility in its first year: an invoice that includes a large “unallocated” bucket gets disputed on arrival. TensorCost’s Operations page (Spend · Operations) is built around this framing directly. Rather than a workflow checklist, it leads with one number: allocation coverage for the selected period, with the dollar amounts behind it and a plain-language interpretation banded at 90% (“ready to graduate to chargeback”) and 70% (“getting there”). Below that is the one real action this page exists for: an allocation-rule editor (create, edit, delete rules) that raises coverage by mapping more of the unattributed spend to a team or cost center. A tenant with real spend but no allocation rules yet is not treated as an empty state — 0% coverage is itself the useful number Operations exists to show. The zero-data case is reserved for genuinely nothing-to-show situations: no cloud account connected at all, or connected with zero spend in the selected window.Team scorecard
Team scorecard (Spend · Team scorecard) is the weekly companion to Operations — a per-team view of how spend moved over the current ISO week, meant for a Monday-morning check rather than a running total to act on by itself. It carries the same coverage band as Operations and Chargeback (one gating metric, shown consistently across all three pages) because a per-team number built on low allocation coverage invites a comparison the underlying data can’t support. The comparison is explicitly non-judgmental: a team spending more this week than last is reported as a fact (“up 12.4% vs. the same span last week”), not flagged as good or bad — a legitimate ramp in usage looks identical to waste from this page’s data alone. This page’s period is fixed to the current week server-side; there’s no selector for other weeks today; a real cross-week view needs a period parameter the backend doesn’t accept yet.Once coverage is high enough
When allocation coverage is high enough to trust, the next step is Chargeback — turning that allocated spend into per-team records finance can use. See Chargeback and showback for what that actually produces (and, importantly, what it doesn’t).Industry benchmark
Spend · Benchmark compares your own cost efficiency against an anonymized peer band for your industry, opt-in only:- Not opted in: you see only your own value, with a prompt to turn on data sharing in Settings.
- Opted in, enough peers: you see your value, its band (e.g. “top quartile”), and the p25/p50/p75/p90 markers for the metric and period.
- Opted in, not enough peers yet: percentiles are withheld until enough tenants in your industry have joined — you see a preview notice and your own value only, never a fabricated distribution.