Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) is a costing method developed at Harvard by Robert Kaplan and Steven Anderson. It uses time equations derived from operational data to assign costs accurately to customers, products, services and channels, replacing the subjective employee surveys of traditional ABC.

How does AI speed up profitability modelling?

AI accelerates TDABC by automatically parsing financial data (SAF-T, ERP exports), classifying general-ledger accounts into cost pools, and generating first-draft time equations and Whale Curve dashboards. This reduces model build time from weeks to days while human TDABC expertise validates the result.

Who is Cost & Profitability Consulting for?

We serve mid-market companies (EUR 5M-500M revenue) in healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and professional services that need to know their true profitability by customer, product, service and channel.

What is a Whale Curve?

A Whale Curve is a cumulative-profitability chart that ranks customers or products from most to least profitable. It typically reveals that a minority of customers generate well over 100% of profit while others destroy it, guiding pricing and portfolio decisions.

AI-assisted Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing & Profitability, since 2010

Know exactly where you make money and where you quietly lose it.

We build the cost and profitability model your ERP never gave you: every product, customer and service, costed to the truth. Not a slide deck, but a working model your team can own and run, from the cost numbers all the way to the decisions they drive.

Take the Profit Check How we work

5-minute diagnostic · No data upload required

CostCtrl · Profit by quarter

+23%

avg. margin recovered

01 The discipline

Traditional accounting tells you what you spent. We tell you why and whether it was worth it.

Volume-based allocation hides the truth. When you spread overhead evenly, high-complexity products subsidise simple ones, small orders look profitable, and strategic decisions rest on fiction.

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC) traces every euro of resource consumption to the activity that caused it. The result: a profitability model that shows you exactly which customers, products and channels create value, and which quietly destroy it. From that cost truth, we work with you all the way through to strategy and execution, so the numbers actually change what the business does next.

Profit heatmap: customer x product margin density

02 See it move

This is the conversation a CFO has never been able to have.

Move the levers. Watch the whale curve reshape in real time. This is what a working profitability model gives you: the ability to simulate pricing changes, cost shifts and customer mix scenarios before you commit a single euro.

03 The engagement

From diagnostic to embedded model in four stages.

See the full method

Profit Check

5 min, self-serve

A structured diagnostic that scores your organisation across seven profit dimensions. No data upload. You receive a personalised report with the areas of highest latent margin.

ProfitAudit 360

3 weeks, fixed fee

We take your general ledger and transactional data and build a full TDABC model. You get a whale curve, customer-level P&L, and a clear map of where margin leaks.

Build & Embed

6-10 weeks

We deploy CostCtrl with your data, train your team, and embed the model into your monthly management cycle. You own the model. We transfer the knowledge.

Advisory

Ongoing

Quarterly reviews, model updates, pricing strategy support, and scenario analysis. We stay as long as you need a sparring partner for profitability decisions.

Our preferred platform

Methodology is the brain. CostCtrl is the machine.

CostCtrl is the SaaS platform purpose-built for TDABC profitability modelling. It ingests your ERP data, runs time equations, and outputs customer-level and product-level P&Ls in minutes, not months. AI accelerates the model build and the reading of results, while every number stays traceable to its source, so the output is fast and still defensible in front of a board.

Upload financial and operational data or CSV, model runs in minutes
Whale curve, treemap, heatmap dashboards
AI-assisted model build with every number traceable to source

Explore CostCtrl

CostCtrl · Whale Curve

      AI · Cost and Profitability    

AI builds cost models fast. Proving they are right is the hard part.

An AI cost model can be ready in hours instead of weeks. It can also assign costs to the wrong place, and a wrong allocation tells you to grow the customer that is losing you money. We use 25 years of TDABC experience to build these models with AI and, just as important, to check that the result holds up.

FIG. 01 · The AI Profitability Trust Framework™

Explore AI for Cost and Profitability →

Case · Industrial distribution, New Zealand

A €1.335M cost-to-serve problem, made visible, then halved.

A New Zealand industrial distributor with 1,951 customers found that 830 of them were contributing negatively once true cost-to-serve was attributed: a combined €1.335M. With the model in hand, the team re-priced loss-making combinations and reset service terms. The negative cohort has roughly halved, to around €665K, with loss-making customers down from 830 to 295.

€670K

Loss-making contribution recovered

535

Loss-making customers turned around

€1.335M

Hidden cost-to-serve made visible

Two kinds of leader call us. Both are done guessing.

Private Equity

For Private Equity

You acquired a platform company. The management pack says 14% EBITDA. But which portfolio companies, which BUs, which customers are actually creating that margin? We show you, in weeks.

Portfolio-wide profitability benchmarking
Due-diligence cost model for add-ons
Post-acquisition margin improvement roadmap

SMEs

For SMEs

You have 500+ SKUs, dozens of customers, and a gut feeling that some orders lose money. Your ERP gives you revenue per customer, but not cost-to-serve. We close that gap.

Customer and product-level P&L
Pricing strategy grounded in real cost data
A model your finance team can update monthly

Field notes on cost truth.

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WHO WE ARE

Founded by practitioners, not theorists.

Cost & Profitability Consulting was founded in 2010 with one mission: bring world-class cost management to companies that need it most. 25+ years of TDABC implementations, 150+ client engagements, and a profitability platform built because nothing on the market worked the way it should.

Meet the team

Miguel Guimaraes at The Costing Conference, Amsterdam 2025

The Costing Conference · Amsterdam 2025

Start with the truth

Your Profit Check takes five minutes. The insight lasts a career.

No data upload. No sales call. Just 14 questions across seven dimensions and a personalised profitability report.

Take the Profit Check Talk to us

Ask us anything

usually replies in minutes

Hi. I can answer the quick questions about cost, method and timing right here. For anything specific to your business, I'll hand you to Miguel on WhatsApp.

Talk to Miguel now

Free. No bot loops. Straight to a person.