Terminology.
Every term on a screen, in a mail or in an answer, in one place. A word here means one thing everywhere; a word not here is not used.
Every term, defined
- Estate
- Every AI source, model, agent, seat and workload an organization pays for.
- Ledger
- The reconciled record of every AI dollar, attributed, with what it produced.
- Source
- A connector that reads a vendor: OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, a gateway, a seat tool, a business system.
- Bill
- What the vendor charged, read from the vendor, shown beside the ledger, never used to fill it.
- Reconciled
- The ledger's total for a source against the bill for the same days. Exact, or the difference is shown.
- No owner yet
- Spend no rule, tag or trace has given an owner. A named row on every screen, never hidden.
- Allocation
- A decision dividing shared cost across teams or workflows, by a method the business chose. Never evidence, never attribution, and it never moves the total.
- Teams
- Team inside department inside business unit. Each AI call keeps only its team, so a reorganization changes no past records.
- Department
- A group of teams, such as Engineering, Finance or Support.
- Coverage
- The share of spend with an owner. It rises when you publish a rule, never by estimate.
- Opportunity
- A saving or a risk Valistry found in your AI calls, with its evidence, the AI calls behind it, the change to make and the work it needs.
- The work a change needs
- Low, medium or high effort. Low effort needs no code: a rule, a cap, a flag or a seat.
- Prompt signature
- A hash of a prompt's shape, never its text. Calls sharing one are the same prompt doing the same job.
- Low-effort savings
- The opportunities that need no code, summed. The one figure Starter shows of the opportunities.
- Outcome
- The business result a workflow produced, from the system that recorded it, with its evidence class.
- Evidence class
- Observed, declared or unmeasured. Every cost-per-outcome figure says which.
- Cost per successful outcome
- Attributed spend divided by successful outcomes, retry waste kept apart. Never cost per token.
- Ledger
- Every decision on an opportunity: expected on approval, verified after the change, against the same baseline.
- Verified saving
- What the ledger measured after a change, at least seven days on, against the same baseline. Expected is never overwritten. A change taken back stops counting, and the measurement stays as history.
- Realization rate
- Verified savings over expected savings. The company's own metric.
- Lever
- One way to cut AI cost, such as prompt caching or a cap on retries. Every lever lists them all, in eight groups.
- What good looks like
- A measure beside your own best month, published figures, and the median of companies your size once five or more share.
- Budget
- A monthly limit on a team, an agent, a product, a customer, a model or a vendor — in dollars or tokens — set from what that thing already spends.
- Policy
- A rule with what happens if it goes over: observe, warn, require approval, enforce. Tried on your past spending before it is live.
- Governed spend
- The share of AI spend under a budget with an owner.
- Alert
- Something one of the seven watches raised: a spike with its cause, a budget, a policy, approvals waiting, a problem back after a fix. Sent once; open until someone acknowledges or dismisses it.
- Kind of work
- What the AI calls were for: coding assistant, chat assistant, in-product agent, retrieval, speech, image, evaluation, tool calls.
- Priced by
- What the vendor priced: tokens, seats, audio seconds, images, the bill itself, or use a plan already covers.
- View
- A named part of the estate with its own channel. It narrows a question and never re-answers it; it is a convenience, not a permission.
- Rate agreement
- What you negotiated with a provider, entered because no API reports it. It re-prices this period and never touches the bill.
- Starter, Platform, Enterprise
- Free at any spend; priced case by case; the Platform tier on an order form above $100,000 a month.
Where to next
- What we collect
- What one line of the ledger carries, and the seven things it can never hold.
- Connectors
- For each source: what it reads, the access it needs, what it attributes on its own, how to connect it.
- The read API
- The same figures the screens show, as JSON, with the key or the sign-in the editor uses.