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Governance and exports

This is where attribution becomes a controlled financial and operating output: budgets and policies that govern spend, the FOCUS chargeback export finance can reproduce without Venturi, scheduled reports delivered under each recipient's own access, and the billing basis your contract is measured on. These surfaces live under the Operate and Optimize navigation groups, and every action here fails closed.

Budgets and governance

Governance (Optimize → Governance) is where you define budgets and the policies that watch them.

  • Budgets set a spend limit on a scope — an organization, workspace, team, or project. A budget view shows current spend, the forecast, the threshold state, and the owner, so a budget owner always knows where they stand against their limit.
  • Policies are governed objects with a clear lifecycle (draft → active → archived). Publishing or changing a high-impact policy can require a second approver, and rejection requires a reason code from an audited taxonomy.

Governance modes: PASSIVE, SHAPE, GATE

Governance runs in one of three modes. Shape is the default, and it is what every account uses during onboarding.

  • PASSIVE — observe only. Budgets and policies record state and raise alerts; they take no action on traffic.
  • SHAPE (default) — advisory guardrails. A budget or policy raises alerts, informs decisions, and can steer routing recommendations, but it does not block or throttle your production AI traffic.
  • GATE — active enforcement that can deny or throttle a request before it reaches a provider.

Target-state: GATE enforcement

GATE is never enabled during default onboarding and is never default-on. It is unavailable unless you explicitly enable it for a named workload, and only after that workload's trust readiness reaches OPERATIONALLY_TRUSTED. Even when GATE is enabled, a platform failure still fails open — Venturi will not become a single point of failure for your production AI traffic. GATE enforcement is a target-state control and is not generally available; the default experience is SHAPE, which gives you visibility and guardrails, not a kill switch on your traffic.

Approval thresholds

Configurable thresholds determine when an action needs more than one set of eyes — for example, a budget above a set value escalates from single-approver to dual-approver, and an override on large spend requires a second approver. Dependency rules prevent enabling an object whose prerequisites aren't met — for instance, publishing a chargeback report while reconciliation is still estimated is blocked with a labeled reason until it reaches reconciled.

Alerts and notifications

Budgets, anomalies, optimization opportunities, dispute-SLA breaches, and connector health all raise alerts. Notifications are delivered through the in-app notification center and your chosen channels — email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a signed webhook. Time-bound escalation chains advance an unacknowledged critical alert up the chain (owner → role queue → admin) until someone acknowledges it, respecting your business calendar.

The FOCUS chargeback export

The headline export is a FOCUS v1.2-conformant chargeback file. FOCUS (the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification) is the open standard your finance and FinOps teams already use, so the file drops straight into existing tooling.

  • 64 columns — the 57 FOCUS v1.2 base columns plus 7 Venturi extension columns (ownership state, capture feasibility, time basis, carbon grams, and more).
  • Required cost fields BilledCost and EffectiveCost are always present.
  • Cost is computed on the model actually served, with measured tokens — never the model requested, and never from a list price.
  • Only chargeback-ready rows (coper ≥ 0.80) are included by default, so you never bill a team on an attribution you couldn't defend.
curl -X POST https://api.venturi.systems/v1/exports/focus \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ARGMIN_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
        "period": "2026-05",
        "scope": "organization",
        "format": "csv",
        "chargeback_ready_only": true
      }'

BillingPeriodStart,ServiceName,x_OwnershipState,BilledCost,EffectiveCost,...
2026-05-01,Amazon Bedrock,deterministically_resolved,4821.07,4821.07,...
2026-05-01,Azure OpenAI,strongly_inferred,1290.44,1290.44,...

Reproducible without us

The export is built so your auditor can reconcile the chargeback figure to your cloud bill without Venturi's involvement. Each row reconciles to a billing-period figure, carries its ownership state and confidence, and links back to the evidence that produced it. That audit independence is the point — finance accepts numbers it can verify itself.

For the full column list and the capability end to end, see reporting & exports and cost attribution & chargeback.

Export jobs, durability, and provenance

The Exports surface (Operate → Exports) is the queue of every export you've requested. A FOCUS build runs as a background job that survives navigation and sign-out; its status is server-authoritative throughout (queued → running → succeeded → failed), and completion fires an in-app notification plus your chosen channel with a deep link to the finished artifact and its schema-version manifest. A failed job shows a reason and a retry path — never a silent disappearance.

Every export records its provenance:

  • The requester, and the approver where approval was required;
  • The filters and time window;
  • The source freshness and method basis (estimated / reconciled);
  • The confidence floor applied and the excluded unknowns;
  • The file hash and signature metadata.

Exports are governed by role, scope, confidence, residency, and retention. Export creation fails closed — a user without scope sees a permission message naming the determining factor, never another tenant's data. Any analytic table or saved view also exports to CSV, Excel, or JSON with interpretation-metadata columns, and a dashboard or tile exports to PDF/PNG/CSV with the freshness timestamp and method labels stamped on, so a screenshot is never mistaken for live truth.

Scheduled reports

Bind a saved view to a format, a cadence, and a recipient list to create a scheduled report. Each recipient's copy is rendered under their authorization — a team lead scoped to one team sees only that team; workforce-individual data stays hidden for non-workforce roles; EU rows respect residency; small cohorts stay suppressed. A recipient who loses access simply stops receiving in-scope rows on the next run. Reports run on your business calendar and record every delivery.

What's included in a chargeback — and what isn't

Result In a default chargeback export? Where it stays visible
deterministically_resolved, strongly_inferred at coper ≥ 0.80 Included Export + dashboard
bounded / Provisional (coper < 0.80) Excluded Reconciliation report, coverage
Stage-C allocated / network-derived splits Excluded (capped below the floor) Shown as shared cost
unknown / not_identifiable Excluded Unknown Spend Analyzer
Disputed Excluded while open Dispute surface

Unknown, provisional, and disputed values remain visible in reconciliation reports so finance can always see exactly what was excluded and why — nothing is hidden, and nothing below the floor is ever silently billed.

The billing basis

Your commercial agreement is measured on the same numbers you see in the app. Billing visibility lives in the admin console's billing card; billing mutation is admin-only and fails closed.

  • The billable base is reconciled-actual monitored spend at coper ≥ 0.80 — the one canonical floor, measured against a frozen, usage-normalized counterfactual.
  • Savings-share applies only to verified, realized savings below that frozen baseline. Organic growth is never billed as savings.
  • The non-double-charge invariant guarantees spend overage and savings-share never bill the same dollar.
  • Quarterly true-up reconciles actual monitored spend against the included band.

See administration › admin console for billing visibility and optimization & adoption for how verified savings are established.

Next steps