Buyer's Guide Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Jan 18, 2025 4 min read

Finance + Engineering

Aligned buying.

The partnership

Engineering and finance need a shared language. Cost per transaction, cost per user, cost per feature.

Without that language, finance sees "$200k AWS bill" and engineering sees "3 services, growing fast". Both are right; neither makes a decision.

Build the partnership as a regular meeting, not a quarterly fire drill.

Monthly: review actuals vs forecast. Variances above 10% need a written explanation, not a verbal one.

Quarterly: revisit forecast and rate cards. Cloud rate negotiations happen here; AWS, Azure, and GCP all reward predictability.

Annual: full cost review tied to the budget cycle. Rebalance commits, drop underused capacity, plan major migrations.

Tagging discipline. Every cloud resource tagged with team, service, and environment. Untagged spend is invisible to finance.

Forecasts in dollars, not in vCPUs. Convert with a rate card; finance doesn't read AWS pricing pages.

Risk register. Capacity ceilings, vendor lock-ins, contract renewals coming up. Finance wants to know before the surprise.

Budget allocation by team, not by service. Teams own decisions; services churn.

Decision authority. Engineering shouldn't need a finance approval for every $5k AWS spend; set thresholds.

Time to negotiate. AWS deals close in 6-12 weeks; finance must engage early, not at deal close.

Set up a monthly finops review with one engineer and one finance person. 30 minutes; standing meeting.

Build one shared dashboard: spend by team, forecast vs actual, top 5 cost movers.

Write a one-page "how we work together" doc. New hires on either side should be able to read it on day 1.