FOCUS 1.4 Made Token Spend Official. That's Not the Same as Making It Legible.
The FinOps Foundation's first spec to treat tokens as a billing object changes what vendors must produce. It doesn't close the attribution gap finance teams actually face.
June 14, 2026 · Spendline · FinOps, FOCUS, token spend, governance
AI Gateway, LLM Observability, or AI Spend Governance: What Each Layer Actually Does
The AI cost tooling category is fragmented and confusing. Here's the honest map - what gateways do, what observability does, what spend governance does, and how the three stack together.
May 2, 2026 · Spendline · FinOps, tooling, architecture
AI COGS vs R&D: A CFO's Decision Tree for Classifying AI Spend on the P&L
How to classify AI spend on the income statement - when inference is COGS, when fine-tuning is R&D, and the edge cases where reasonable people disagree. A practical decision tree for finance leaders.
May 1, 2026 · Spendline · finance, accounting, FinOps
The AI Month Close: How Finance Teams Reconcile LLM Spend Like Any Other COGS Line
A practical guide to closing the books on AI spend - what makes it hard today, the four-step process modern finance teams use, and the controls auditors will eventually expect.
May 1, 2026 · Spendline · finance, month close, FinOps
AI Has Broken SaaS Unit Economics
When inference becomes COGS, ARR is no longer enough. You need contribution margin by customer, workflow, and request.
May 1, 2026 · Spendline · finance, unit economics, FinOps