A Practitioner’s Introduction to Job Order Costing (JOC)
If Activity‑Based Costing explains why cost happens, Job Order Costing shows us exactly how it accumulates to the work we do every day. By following cost from resources to activities and into individual jobs, we start to see how requests, deployments, and even model inferences carry different costs, and why that matters for real-world decision making in cloud, platforms, and AI.
The Lineage of Accounting Concepts Leading Up to AI Costing
Even though AI token costing feels new, parts of it resemble patterns we’ve worked with for years in Activity Based Costing and Job Order Costing. When we view tokens as units of work, the lineage becomes easier to see. This post offers that perspective as one way to ground the discussion and support the shared learning happening across the field.