Showback
Attributing a closed month of cloud spend to the teams that caused it — and stating honestly how much of it could not be attributed.
At a glance
| Route | /showback |
| Section | Cost & Spend |
| Page permission | unit_economics |
What it is
Showback takes a closed month of cloud spend and attributes it to the teams, products, or cost centres that caused it — and, just as importantly, reports how much of the month it could not attribute, and why.
Showback vs. chargeback
Showback tells each team what their share of the bill was. Chargeback actually bills it to their budget.
Most organisations should run showback for a few months first. It surfaces every argument about the methodology before real money moves.
Who it is for
- Finance owners who have to publish a number per team.
- Platform owners who have to defend that number when a team disputes their share.
How it works
It runs over a closed period
Allocation runs over the closed period rather than month-to-date, so the number does not move after it is published. A team that receives a figure on the 5th sees the same figure on the 20th.
Coverage is reported alongside the allocation
This is the design decision that matters most.
Why hiding the gap breaks showback
Unattributed spend is shown as its own figure rather than being spread silently across the teams that did have tags.
Spreading it is the failure mode that makes showback reports get argued with rather than acted on: a well-tagged team ends up subsidising a badly-tagged one, notices, and stops trusting the report entirely.
Features
- Allocation of a closed month to teams, products, or cost centres
- Explicit coverage percentage reported alongside every allocation
- Unattributed spend surfaced as its own line, with the reason
- Stable figures — a published month does not move
- Period handling that treats month boundaries consistently
How to use it
Improve attribution before publishing anything
Run Tag Governance and Ownership first. Showback reports what tagging gives it — it cannot invent attribution that does not exist.
Publish the first month with the coverage figure visible
Do not hide it. A report that says "89% attributed" is one a team can be held to; one that implies 100% will be checked and rejected.
Work the unattributed bucket down
Each month, look at what could not be attributed and fix the cause — usually a set of untagged resources or a shared service with no allocation rule.
Use allocation rules for genuinely shared cost
Cost Allocation distributes shared infrastructure that no tag can attribute. That is the right tool for the shared remainder — not for compensating for poor tagging.
Move to chargeback only once teams accept the methodology
The number should be boring before it becomes billable.
Why it matters
A showback report that states its own coverage is one a team can be held to.
One that hides the gap gets rejected the first time an engineer checks it — and once a team has caught the report being wrong, they will dispute every figure that follows.
Connects to
- Depends on Tag Governance and Ownership for attribution
- Uses rules from Cost Allocation for shared cost
- Feeds Unit Economics
- Reports through Reports