Insights

Field notes on cost truth, pricing and the future of costing.

What we're learning across 150 engagements, written for finance leaders, not for footnotes.

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Insight

Cost Data in Pricing Decisions: Stop Guessing, Start Knowing

Most pricing decisions are made with incomplete information. Companies know their market price, their competitor’s approximate price, and their gut feeling about...

Insight

Cost Data in Pricing Decisions: Stop Guessing, Start Knowing

Most pricing decisions are made with incomplete information. Companies know their market price, their competitor’s approximate price, and their gut feeling about...

Insight

How Retail Chains Can Stop Losing Money on “Popular” Products

The Popularity Trap Walk into any retail chain’s head office and ask which products are performing well. You will hear the same...

Insight

Cost Model Governance: How to Keep Your Model Accurate After Year One

Why Models Go Stale Building a cost model is the easy part. The hard part is keeping it alive. Most organisations that...

Insight

5 Questions Every CFO Should Ask Before the Next Budget Cycle

The Budget Ritual Nobody Questions Every year, finance teams across the world repeat the same exercise: take last year’s numbers, apply an...

Insight

Customer Profitability Analysis: Beyond Revenue, Toward True Margin Per Client

The Whale Curve in Practice In most companies, the relationship between customer rank and cumulative profitability follows what Kaplan and Cooper called...

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Why Your Best Clients May Be Your Worst — A Cost-to-Serve Analysis

Every company has a few clients they call their best. They generate the highest revenue, they’ve been around the longest, and the...

Insight

Indirect Cost Allocation: Why the Method You Choose Changes Everything

What Are Indirect Costs, Exactly? Indirect costs are expenses that cannot be directly traced to a single product, client, or service —...

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TDABC in Professional Services: How Law Firms and Consultancies Find Their Real Margins

The Billable Hour Is Not a Profitability Model Most professional services firms — law firms, management consultancies, accounting practices, engineering firms —...

Insight

What Finance Teams Get Wrong About Overhead Allocation

Ask any CFO how their business allocates overhead, and you’ll likely get a confident answer. Ask how accurate that allocation actually is,...

Insight

The Hidden Cost of Complexity: Why More Products Usually Means Less Profit

Most businesses assume that a broader product or service portfolio means more revenue opportunities. Add a new SKU, launch a service variant,...

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How to Know if Your Pricing Is Killing Your Profits

Most businesses price in the dark. Here are 5 signs your pricing is eroding margins — and how TDABC gives you the...

Insight

The Excuse Factory: 7 Barriers to Profitability (And the Truth Behind Each One)

Companies that adopt TDABC see a 3x improvement in EBIT. So why do most companies never start? The Excuse Factory never closes....

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TDABC explained: the practical guide for business leaders

If you run a business and suspect your product or service costs don’t reflect reality, you’re not alone. Most companies use traditional...

Insight

The Whale Curve: find which clients make and destroy your profit

Imagine discovering that 20% of your clients generate 150-300% of your total profit, while 30% are actively destroying it. Sounds impossible? This...

Insight

Cost-to-serve analysis: how to know what each client really costs

How much does it really cost to serve each of your clients? If your answer is “I don’t know” or “roughly the...

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The Future of Cost Management: Where TDABC, Software, and AI Converge

For decades, cost management has been stuck in a paradox. Every CFO wants accurate product and customer profitability data, yet most organisations...

Insight

Cost Intelligence for Clinics: How Visibility Drives Better Profit Decisions

When clinic managers think about improving profitability, the instinct is almost always the same: grow revenue. Attract more patients, add new services,...

Insight

New Tariffs and Cost Chaos: Why Simulation-Ready Costing Models Matter

When new tariffs are announced, the same pattern repeats in manufacturing companies around the world. Finance teams scramble to open spreadsheets. They...

Insight

From Actuals to Simulations: Building a Strategic Costing Layer Above Your ERP

Every manufacturer with an ERP system has access to an enormous volume of cost data. Purchase orders, production orders, labour records, material...

Insight

Transforming Dental Clinic Profitability: A TDABC Case Study

Healthcare is one of the sectors where the gap between perceived profitability and actual profitability is widest. Dental clinics are no exception....

Insight

Profitability Is Not an 80/20 Game: Why the Pareto Rule Misleads in Cost Management

The Pareto principle is one of the most widely cited rules in business. 80% of your profit comes from 20% of your...

Insight

Gross Margin vs. Net Profitability: Why Your Customer Profitability Numbers Are Probably Wrong

If you measure customer or product profitability based on gross margin, you are almost certainly making decisions with incomplete information. It is...

Insight

The Top Requirements for a Successful TDABC Project: Data, People, and Methodology

Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing projects fail for predictable reasons. After working on TDABC implementations across multiple industries, the pattern is clear: success depends...

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