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For finance analysts and engineers alike, understanding the performance of your technology estate has grown far beyond tagging and invoices. From attribution hierarchies to unit economics and budgets, this glossary explains the concepts that matter so your team can evaluate, implement, and scale spend governance with confidence

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Planning

  • Financial Attribution: Cost and spend allocation defined at a whole of organisation level, reflective of budgetary or P&L Cost Centres.
  • Unit Economics: A measure of a function, feature, or system’s cost to the business at the per unit level. Provides a foundational input to understanding profitability.
  • Business Metrics: Quantitative measures used to track product, operational,
    or financial performance.
  • Budgets: Financial tools designed to estimate expected spend over a period.
  • Goals: A measurable target for technology spend or efficiency.

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Performance

  • Dashboards: Monitoring tools designed to provide a long run view of specific cost contributors, usage, or other views.
  • Anomalies: Unexpected changes to spend, out of line with historic spend patterns and trajectory.
  • Analytics: Allows a user to investigate the numbers presented in the financial attribution model, providing the flexibility to re-slice data on an as needed basis.

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AI

  • Atlas: The backbone agent platform for Optimaze Products. Responsible for auth, routing, creation, and update of Optimaze Products.

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Attribution

  • Attribution: Optimaze proprietary methodology for assigning costs to the appropriate internal or external stakeholders as you define them.
  • Financial Attribution Model: Finance-based attribution model that reflects how monetary flow ties to P&L or financial budgets.
  • Attribution Root: The apex of an organisation in their cost model. Shows the sum total of all attribution nodes below.
  • Attribution Nodes: The cost centres as defined in an organisation’s budget, P&L, or operating model.

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Platform-wide

  • Filters: A collection of filter objects, supporting complex query logic via AND/OR operators.
  • Filter: A specific criterion or set of criteria used to narrow down or refine the data being displayed or analysed.
  • Condition (Filter): A single logical rule or parameter applied within a filter (e.g., ‘equals’, ‘contains’, ‘greater than’) that determines which data points are included.
  • Data Source: Data available from an integration or provider.
  • Data Sources: List of available data sources. Available integrations.
  • Provider: A 3rd party technology tool or service that provides data for us to ingest and analyse.
  • 3rd Party: Someone not related to Optimaze.
  • Integration: One or many instances of a provider. Scoped and based on customer setup and access.