Cost allocation that finance trusts because tags actually exist.

The first finance meeting confirmed what we already knew: every previous attempt to enforce tags had failed because the cost of doing it correctly was front-loaded onto teams and the benefit accrued to finance. We restructured the incentive — finance ran the amnesty programme themselves, with a dashboard each team could fix without ticket overhead.

Tag Policies defined the canonical key/value shapes. SCP enforced creation only when the required tags were present (after the amnesty). Cost Categories rolled the tags into the finance-team-friendly hierarchy. Config alerted on drift.

The finance report shipped in week seven. Two of the cost categories were genuinely surprising — one product line was 4x more expensive than the team had assumed. Conversations followed. Architecture changes followed those.