A startup accountant cannot allocate cloud costs to COGS, S&M, and R&D because the bills lack visibility into usage by user type or purpose, making it impossible to implement a systematic, repeatable methodology without manual work.

Workarounds Described

• receives cloud invoices as lump sums with no distinction by user type or purpose
• plans to use management estimates and revisit them periodically

Implied Software Gaps

• Automated tagging of cloud resources by user segment and activity type at the time of consumption
• Allocation engine that splits costs based on configurable percentage rules derived from engineering data
• Audit-ready reporting that shows the rationale and data behind each cost classification

CloudCost Allocator for AI

A SaaS tool that integrates with AWS/GCP billing and engineering telemetry to automatically classify cloud costs by business purpose (COGS, S&M, R&D) using user tags and usage patterns. Generates audit-ready allocation reports with configurable rules and provides documentation trails for each allocation decision, eliminating spreadsheet guesswork.