Departments

A single-valued accounting dimension for attributing AI spend across people, teams, and projects, including personal AI use. Separate from RBAC; pure accounting.

A department is an accounting label for spend. You name departments (Engineering, Marketing, …) once, assign people, teams, and projects to them, and spend rolls up by department across the whole org, including each person’s personal AI use.

Departments answer a question the team and per-user views cannot: “are Marketing people spending more than Engineering people, including their personal AI use?”. Teams are a many-to-many access construct (a person can be in several), so they are a poor single attribution key, and RBAC roles answer authorization, not accounting. A department is single-valued per person per org, so every dollar lands in exactly one bucket.

Pairs with: Governance dashboard for the Spend by department card, Members & invites and Workspaces & access for where you assign them, and Roles & permissions for why departments are not access control.

Departments are pure accounting. They never grant or restrict access. Assigning someone to “Engineering” changes how their spend is attributed, nothing else.

How spend is attributed

Every trace that hits the gateway resolves to exactly one department, picked by this precedence:

1. The principal user’s department. If the trace has a principal user and that user is assigned to a department, it wins.
2. The user’s team department (inherited). If the principal user has no own department, the department of their team is used.
3. The project’s department. A trace with no principal user (an autonomous agent) attributes to the department of the project it ran in.
4. Unassigned. If none of the above resolve, the trace rolls up under Unassigned.

The principal user’s department always wins over the project’s, and a trace is counted once. So a developer’s personal AI use and the autonomous agents their team builds can land in the same department.

Where you assign departments

An org can have tens of thousands of members, so assignment lives on the pages that already paginate the org chart, not as one flat list:

Surface	What you assign	Where
People	A member’s department. Their spend, including personal AI use, rolls up to it.	Members page, per row
Teams	A team’s department. The default its members and projects inherit when they have none of their own.	Teams page, per row
Projects	A project’s department. Agent spend with no human principal rolls up here.	Project settings

The departments page itself only creates, renames, and archives departments, and links out to those surfaces. It never renders a per-person assignment list, so it stays usable in a large org.

Managing departments

Open the departments page under Settings → AI Governance → Departments to:

• Create a department by name (Engineering, Marketing, …).
• Edit a department’s name.
• Archive a department you no longer use.

It belongs to your organization; a member of another org never sees it.

SCIM auto-assignment

For organizations that provision identities through SCIM, assignment is automatic. The SCIM 2.0 Enterprise User extension carries a standard costCenter attribute, so an IdP (Okta, Entra ID, …) can drive department membership the same way it drives department or division. Manual per-row assignment is the fallback for orgs without SCIM.

IdP action	Result in LangWatch
Provisions a user whose costCenter is Engineering	The user’s membership carries department “Engineering”
Provisions a user whose costCenter is a name that does not exist yet	The department is created on first use and the user is assigned to it
Updates a user’s costCenter from Engineering to Marketing	The assignment is replaced, not added; the user carries “Marketing”
Removes a user’s costCenter attribute	The user is unassigned; their spend rolls up under Unassigned

Archiving

Archiving a department is non-destructive:

• It no longer appears in the assignment picker on the members, teams, and project surfaces.
• Spend previously attributed to it rolls up under Unassigned rather than disappearing.

Assignments are never nulled on archive. The rollup maps a stored department back to a name through the active departments only, so an archived department’s spend resolves as Unassigned without any backfill. Reusing an archived department’s name for a new active one is allowed.

Spend by department on the dashboard

The governance dashboard renders a Spend by department card. Each department’s total includes spend from personal projects, team projects, and agent projects attributed to it, aggregated across every project in the org.

This is the cross-org view: the card is not limited to a single governance ingestion project, so a fully active org with no dedicated ingestion source still sees real numbers. The Marketing-versus-Engineering comparison reads from departments, not from RBAC roles or team-membership counts.

Every underlying query is tenant-isolated: a department rollup for your org contains zero spend from any other org.

Permissions

• Creating, renaming, and archiving departments requires organization:manage (granted to ADMIN by default).
• Assigning people, teams, and projects to a department happens on the respective surfaces under the same admin permission.
• Departments never appear in any access-control decision. They are an accounting dimension only.

Where to next

• See the rollup: Governance dashboard.
• Assign people: Members & invites.
• Understand access vs accounting: Roles & permissions.
• Provision via SCIM: Workspaces & access.