# Financial Tracking > Use when the user asks what the campaign or harness is costing, how spend is trending, which business unit a cost lands on, cost per finding or per repo, whether spend is on budget, or asks to capture/refresh financial tracking over time — e.g. "what did July cost", "spend by business unit", "are we over budget", "cost per critical", "is spend going up", "refresh the financial report". Runs the deterministic spend chain (session actuals → per-lane attribution → business-unit bridge → unit economics → trend) and reports estimates that are always labelled as estimates, with an --invoice seam for reconciling against real billing. - Skill: `openshift/financial-tracking` (Agent Skill, multi-file: 2 files) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add openshift/financial-tracking` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/openshift/financial-tracking/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Marketing & Growth - Author: openshift (https://skillmd.com/u/openshift) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/openshift/financial-tracking --- # Financial tracking > **Paths.** `analysis-results/…` and `progress-tracker/…` in this skill are the > default workspace layout. They resolve through `locations.yaml` in > `$TRAUST_CONFIG_HOME` (`docs/setup.md`, Storage locations); substitute your > configured roots. Answers the questions a budget owner asks — what did it cost, whose budget, is it going up, what did a finding cost — from data the harness already collects. This skill **orchestrates and interprets**; it owns no new source of truth. ## Step 0 — the honesty preamble (never skip) Every figure this skill produces is a **list-price estimate**, not an invoiced actual. Two limits must appear in anything you hand to a human: 1. **At least one rate is unverified.** `config/model-registry.yaml` flags some models as not on the published rate card (a trailing `price unverified` comment), and as of 2026-08 the affected opus-class model carries most campaign spend. Never hardcode which one — `build_financial_report.py` reads the current set from the registry and prints it. Do not strip that line when summarising. 2. **Business-unit coverage is partial.** Spend carries no BU tag anywhere, so it is bridged from the findings tree a session touched. Measured 2026-08-06: ~35% of period cost resolves to a BU; the rest is `bu-unknown`. Never redistribute the unknown remainder across known BUs to make a chart total 100% — quote the coverage figure. If asked for a number without context, give the number **and** which of these apply. A confident unqualified figure is the failure mode here. ## Modes | Token | Does | |---|---| | `report` (default) | Build the period report: cost, unit economics, trend | | `capture` | Refresh the underlying data first, then report | | `bu` | Report including the business-unit split (slower — walks transcripts) | | `reconcile` | Compare estimates against a supplied invoice CSV | ### report ```bash python3 harnessing/financial-tracking/scripts/build_financial_report.py --month --months 6 ``` Reads the metrics ledger only (fast, no transcript walk). Add `--out ` to write Markdown, `--json` for the structured form. ### capture — refresh, then report Run in order; each is deterministic and idempotent: ```bash # 1. session actuals -> ledger (completed days only) python3 -m traust.cli metrics collect-spend --append # 2. per-lane attribution -> ledger (spend-attribution:) python3 -m traust.cli metrics attribute-spend --append # 3. prove the attribution split lost nothing python3 -m traust.cli metrics attribute-spend --reconcile # exit 1 = mismatch # 4. report python3 harnessing/financial-tracking/scripts/build_financial_report.py --months 6 ``` Step 3 is a gate, not a formality: a non-zero exit means tokens were dropped between the collector and the attribution split, and any downstream figure is untrustworthy. Stop and say so. ### bu — business-unit split ```bash python3 harnessing/financial-tracking/scripts/build_financial_report.py --month --by-bu ``` Walks the transcripts (~30s over the current corpus). The BU comes from `findings.db`'s `business_unit` column, which is sourced from `$TRAUST_CONFIG_HOME/corpus-config.yaml` — the metrics-accounting taxonomy. That is exactly what it is for; note that the same tags are explicitly **not** a risk signal and play no role in routing or ceilings (docs/continuous-operations.md, operator directive 2026-07-27). **Reading the output correctly:** the BU table and the per-lane table partition the *same* total along *different* axes. A session can touch a BU's tree without invoking a skill, or run a skill against no tree. The rows will not reconcile against each other, and that is not an error. ### reconcile — check estimates against reality ```bash python3 harnessing/financial-tracking/scripts/build_financial_report.py --month \ --invoice ``` CSV columns: `period,amount_usd[,note]` where `period` is `YYYY-MM`. The report then shows estimate vs invoiced vs variance. Until an invoice is supplied, say plainly that nothing has been checked against billing. ## Budget posture — what is and is not enforced Do not imply spend is being controlled. As of 2026-08-06: - `$TRAUST_CONFIG_HOME/budget-policy.yaml` runs `enforcement: observe` — every weekly tranche computes a budget verdict, records it, and **withholds nothing** (python3 -m traust.cli.budget_shadow). - The only lane the router can ever drop is a full audit, and only when enforcement is `advisory`/`enforced`. - `--monthly-budget` on the router is the sole live gating knob. To answer "are we over budget": compare the period's **lane** subtotal (not the workstation total) against `monthly_budget.usd_central`. The ceiling was derived for steady-state scanning, so judging it against total workstation spend overstates the overage roughly 3.6× (measured 2026-07: $124,060 workstation vs $34,022 lanes). Recorded verdicts accumulate under `budget-shadow` in the ledger — count them to answer "how often would the cap have bound". ## Unit economics — the denominator trap `usd_per_finding` and `usd_per_repo` divide **one period's** spend by an **all-time** corpus count, so they understate true unit cost. State that whenever you quote them. `/census` remains the denominator authority for any published coverage claim; these are internal cost ratios, not coverage metrics. ## Cadence Monthly is the natural period, matching the budget. `capture` is safe to run any time — both append steps skip the current (incomplete) day, so re-running never double-counts and never freezes a partial day. ## Integrations **Consumes:** Claude Code session transcripts (via `collect_session_spend.py` / `attribute_session_spend.py`); the hash-chained metrics ledger (`spend-attribution:*`, `budget-shadow`, `model-spend:*`); `analysis-results/graph/findings.db` (`business_unit`, finding and repo counts); `config/model-registry.yaml` (prices); `$TRAUST_CONFIG_HOME/budget-policy.yaml` (ceiling and enforcement posture); optionally an operator-supplied invoice CSV. **Emits:** a Markdown/JSON financial report (default stdout; `--out` to persist). Terminal by design — it is a reporting view over existing artifacts and introduces no new campaign artifact for another skill to consume. The per-lane numbers it reads are the same ones `build_spend_dashboard.py` renders, so the two cannot disagree. **Related:** `/refresh-dashboards` rebuilds the spend dashboard; `/drift-watch` flags stale spend data; the budget-guard phases are tracked in `progress-tracker/plans/budget-guard-widening-plan.md`.