Cost Showback / Chargeback Automation

The reporting half of cost governance — monthly per-team email with model breakdown, anomaly flags, budget burndown — connecting the engineering surface to the finance surface.

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Tip: Showback is when finance sees the bill broken out by team. Chargeback is when each team's budget actually pays it. The gateway holds the data for both.

What this use case covers

  • The monthly reporting job: per-team / per-cost-center cost breakdown, by model, by day.
  • Anomaly flags: spend up >50% week over week, key approaching budget, model usage outside expected pattern.
  • Budget burndown charts that a non-engineer can read.
  • The delivery shape — email digest, Slack post, dashboard link — chosen by audience.
  • The finance integration: exporting the right CSV / API payload for the chargeback system that already exists.

Why it matters

Engineering is judged on shipping. Finance is judged on attribution. Showback / chargeback is the artifact that makes both sides happy without either having to learn the other's tools.

Coming soon

Implementation coming soon. This use case will ship as a runnable folder in infinite-containers/lite-llm, with a step-by-step lesson here and a companion post and video. See also the related cost governance use case, which is the enforcement half of the same story. Track the full publishing roadmap in USE-CASES.md.