Pricing and profitability

Know which lines make you money

Margin by product, customer and division, on a basis everyone accepts, including the lines currently sold below cost.

What you will be able to see

The numbers you can finally trust

Each one exists in your systems today. None of them is currently something you would bet a decision on.

Margin by product: Ranked, with the lines below zero called out instead of averaged away.
Margin by customer: Where discounting has pushed an account into loss without anyone noticing.
Revenue basis: Net of tax and consistent across every screen that quotes it.
Division contribution: Which parts of the business carry the result.

What changes

Nothing here is a new metric. It is the one you already care about, made trustworthy.

Why you cannot trust it today

The basis moves between reports
One report uses a figure inclusive of tax, another uses net. Both are defensible, and together they make the margin number impossible to trust.
Loss-making lines hide in a page
A count derived from whatever rows a screen loaded will differ from the count across the whole catalog, usually by a lot.
Cost is incomplete
Landed cost, freight and rebates often sit outside the system that reports margin, so the reported figure is optimistic.

What we do about it

Fix the basis
One revenue definition, applied everywhere, agreed before any screen is built.
Count from the catalog
Totals come from the model, not from whichever rows a screen happened to load.
Guardrail the exceptions
A screen that lists the lines below threshold, and a workflow that flags new ones as they appear.

No, but it is worth knowing early. Week one records which cost components you have and which are missing, so we can qualify the margin figure instead of shipping one that is wrong in a way nobody can see.
If the attribution exists in a connected system, yes. Where it only exists at document header level, we will tell you, instead of inferring it.

Other measures