Evidence notes, reconciliation mechanics, and the language of AI cost tie-out. Company byline only — Headframe / ToTheCent.
This note walks through one real reconciliation, ending in a residual of one cent, and shows why that cent cannot be removed by any correction on our side.
This page defines the term we use for that operation, precisely enough that you can check whether any tool — including ours — actually performs it.
An estimate built from a price sheet can drift from the invoice without anyone noticing, because nothing in the estimation pipeline is positioned to notice — the pipeline never looks at the invoice at all.
When finance asks about the AI bill, they are almost never asking for token counts.
This is shadow AI — AI usage that generates real invoice spend but has no accountable owner in your attribution map.
A demo and a production deployment are economically different objects that happen to share code.