Cost centers

Cloud bills arrive organized by service and account — not by the teams, products, or business units that actually own the spend. Cost centers close that gap, so you can answer “how much did the platform team cost this month?” for chargeback and showback.

You work with cost centers in two places, both in the sidebar under Manage:

The Cost centers page is where you define the buckets and the allocation rules that fill them.
The Allocation page shows the result — this month’s spend, broken down by cost center.

What a cost center is

A cost center is a named bucket you allocate spend into — a team, product, or business unit. Cost centers can form a hierarchy: a parent cost center (say, Engineering) can contain children (Platform, Data, Mobile), and each child’s spend rolls up into its parent’s total.

Two rules of thumb keep a hierarchy simple:

A tree can nest up to 5 levels deep.
Spend always enters at the leaves. A center that has its own allocation rules can’t also hold children, so put rules on the bottom-level centers and let parents roll them up.

Creating a cost center

On the Cost centers page, select New cost center and fill in:

Name — how the center appears everywhere. Each name can be used once per organization.
Description (optional) — a note for your teammates about what belongs here.
Parent (optional) — pick an existing center to nest this one under. Only centers without rules of their own can be parents.
Color — the color this center gets in the allocation charts.

A new center starts empty: until you add a rule to it, no spend is routed there and unmatched spend stays in Unallocated. The fastest path is right in the table — select + Add rule on the center’s row.

Reading the Allocation page

The Allocation page shows, for the current calendar month to date, how spend is distributed across your cost centers. The scope picker at the top applies here too — org-wide by default, or narrowed to the integrations you select.

The summary cards up top tell you the state of your allocation at a glance: total spend, how many cost centers are receiving spend, how many rules are active, and how much is Unallocated — spend no rule has claimed yet. The coverage bar turns that into the number to watch: the share of spend that’s mapped to a cost center, with 100% as the goal. A large Unallocated share usually points to a tagging or rule gap.

Below, the By cost center table lists every center that received spend this month:

A parent row shows its whole subtree’s spend — its own plus everything from its children.
% of total is that subtree’s share of organization spend. Parents overlap with their children by design, so the column doesn’t add up to 100%.
The Budget column shows each center’s budget pace, or a + Set budget shortcut to create one scoped to that center.

Centers with no spend in the current scope aren’t listed here — the full roster, with or without spend, lives on the Cost centers page. To confirm a new center’s rules have started matching, watch for it to appear in this table.

Use the breakdown to drive chargeback (billing each team for its share) or showback (reporting each team’s cost without an internal transfer).

Managing cost centers

Creating, editing, or deleting cost centers (and their rules) requires the contributor role or above; viewers can look but not change anything.

To rename a center, change its color or description, or move it under a different parent, use the edit action on its row. Deleting a center also deletes its allocation rules — the dashboard asks you to confirm first. Deletion is blocked while the center still has children, or while any budget — enabled or disabled — is scoped to it; remove those first.

Fill your cost centers with allocation rules.
Shrink the Unallocated bucket by improving tag coverage.
Set a budget scoped to a cost center.