What we're learning across 150 engagements, written for finance leaders, not for footnotes.
Most companies know their margin by product and, if they are lucky, by customer. Far fewer know their margin by channel, and...
Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing is not for everyone, and it is not for every moment in a company’s life. Some businesses are simply...
Almost every profitability model starts life in Excel. It is where the first cost breakdown gets built, where the first margin surprise...
A profitability improvement project is easy to approve and surprisingly hard to prove. The costs are concrete and land early: consulting fees,...
Every business manages its costs somehow. The difference between one that grows margin deliberately and one that hopes for the best is...
For most manufacturers, the gross margin printed on the annual accounts is an average that hides far more than it reveals. In...
Field note · Supply chain cost The return you did not price: quality, returns and rework in high-frequency ordering. More orders mean...
Field note · Supply chain cost When small and frequent is right: order frequency versus opportunity cost. The previous field note argued...
Field note · Supply chain cost Time is money: the hidden cost of a thousand small orders. Every order you place is...
In eight hours, a finance manager who arrives convinced their costing is “good enough” usually leaves with a list of three or...
Every company keeps accounts. Far fewer practise costing. The two are often confused, and the confusion is expensive: it leaves managers steering...
“We built the model two years ago” is one of the phrases most likely to indicate a cost model problem. Not always...
Most logistics companies know their overall margin to the decimal point. Very few can tell you which routes earn it and which...
Under IAS 2, the cost of inventory is not just materials and direct labour. It includes a systematic allocation of production overheads,...
IFRS 18 is effective for reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2027, and it replaces IAS 1. It is the...
IFRS 8 requires you to report a measure of profit or loss for each reportable operating segment, as it is reported to...
Two everyday IFRS judgements depend quietly on the quality of your cost allocation: impairment testing under IAS 36, and the net realisable...
One of the most common barriers to implementing a proper cost model is the belief that you don’t have the data. Most...
Two of the Balanced Scorecard's four perspectives depend on real cost, which most scorecards do not have. Here is how TDABC supplies...
Kaplan and Norton's six-stage system has one place where strategy meets money: Stage 4, Plan Operations. Here is why it needs real...
ABC/TDABC, the Balanced Scorecard, Strategy Maps and the Execution Premium are one connected system. Robert Kaplan is the thread, and cost is...
Value-Based Health Care fails when providers measure outcomes but not real costs. Here is why TDABC is the missing half of the...
Lean and Six Sigma find the minutes. TDABC tells you whether those minutes became profit, and where. Here is how the two...
Ask most finance teams what something costs, and they’ll point to a rate buried in a spreadsheet. Ask where that rate came...
A practitioner walkthrough of the 7-step TDABC method for measuring the true cost of a cycle of care, applied to one illustrative...
Lean and Six Sigma projects often work on the floor but never reach the P&L. Three reasons why, and how TDABC closes...
One Kaizen affects transactions, products, customers and channels differently. TDABC lets you watch a single improvement cascade up every level.
Your ERP and financial data already contain the building blocks for CSRD reporting. How TDABC turns accounting data into audit-ready ESG cost...
Step-by-step guide to allocating environmental costs (energy, waste, emissions) with TDABC. Includes a worked example for CSRD compliance.
Most cost models tell you what things cost. TDABC tells you something more useful: how much of your capacity is actually being...
The CFO of a mid-sized hospital group told me something I’ve heard more times than I can count: “We know roughly where...
The CFO of a mid-sized hospital group told me something I’ve heard more times than I can count: “We know roughly where...
The CFO of a mid-sized hospital group told me something I’ve heard more times than I can count: “We know roughly where...
Every major strategic decision changes your cost structure. A new product line, a new market, a major hire, a pricing change, a...
Insights · TDABC Building a TDABC model requires five data sources: the general ledger, payroll by department, operational transaction data, capacity estimates,...
Most pricing decisions are made with incomplete information. Companies know their market price, their competitor’s approximate price, and their gut feeling about...
The Popularity Trap Walk into any retail chain’s head office and ask which products are performing well. You will hear the same...
Why Models Go Stale Building a cost model is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it alive. Most organisations that...
The Budget Ritual Nobody Questions Every year, finance teams across the world repeat the same exercise: take last year’s numbers, apply an...
The Whale Curve in Practice In most companies, the relationship between customer rank and cumulative profitability follows what Kaplan and Cooper called...
Every company has a few clients they call their best. They generate the highest revenue, they’ve been around the longest, and the...
What Are Indirect Costs, Exactly? Indirect costs are expenses that cannot be directly traced to a single product, client, or service - ...
The Billable Hour Is Not a Profitability Model Most professional services firms - law firms, management consultancies, accounting practices, engineering firms - ...
Ask any CFO how their business allocates overhead, and you’ll likely get a confident answer. Ask how accurate that allocation actually is,...
Most businesses assume that a broader product or service portfolio means more revenue opportunities. Add a new SKU, launch a service variant,...
Most businesses price in the dark. Here are 5 signs your pricing is eroding margins - and how TDABC gives you the...
Companies that adopt TDABC see a 3x improvement in EBIT. So why do most companies never start? The Excuse Factory never closes....
If you run a business and suspect your product or service costs don’t reflect reality, you’re not alone. Most companies use traditional...
Imagine discovering that 20% of your clients generate 150-300% of your total profit, while 30% are actively destroying it. Sounds impossible? This...
How much does it really cost to serve each of your clients? If your answer is “I don’t know” or “roughly the...
For decades, cost management has been stuck in a paradox. Every CFO wants accurate product and customer profitability data, yet most organisations...
When clinic managers think about improving profitability, the instinct is almost always the same: grow revenue. Attract more patients, add new services,...
When new tariffs are announced, the same pattern repeats in manufacturing companies around the world. Finance teams scramble to open spreadsheets. They...
Every manufacturer with an ERP system has access to an enormous volume of cost data. Purchase orders, production orders, labour records, material...
Healthcare is one of the sectors where the gap between perceived profitability and actual profitability is widest. Dental clinics are no exception....
The Pareto principle is one of the most widely cited rules in business. 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your...
If you measure customer or product profitability based on gross margin, you are almost certainly making decisions with incomplete information. It is...
Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing projects fail for predictable reasons. After working on TDABC implementations across multiple industries, the pattern is clear: success depends...
TDABC, ABC, GPK and the costing schools, compared.
Open →What cost truth looks like across 16 sectors.
Open →Every term we use, defined plainly.
Open →The build, step by step.
Open →Costing AI workloads you can defend.
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Open →No data upload. No sales call. Just 14 questions across seven dimensions and a personalised profitability report.