You have the client. We have the TDABC delivery capacity.
You sold a margin, cost-to-serve or value-creation mandate and now you need a cost model built to a standard that survives an investment committee. Building that capability in-house takes years. Subcontracted delivery gives you a senior TDABC practice behind your engagement letter: your brand in front, your client relationship untouched, our team building the model on CostCtrl to your deadline. This page is written for the firm doing the subcontracting, not for the end client.
Subcontracted TDABC delivery is white-label cost-model build: a consultancy, advisory practice or private equity operating team holds the client relationship and the commercial mandate, and contracts a specialist to build the Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing model underneath it. Cost and Profitability Consulting delivers the scoping, the time equations, the model build in CostCtrl, the quality assurance and the analysis pack, under the contracting firm's brand and to its deadline. The contracting firm keeps the client, the read-out and the ongoing relationship.
Delivery capacity that shows up as yours.
What we deliver
- Data scoping and an honest feasibility read before anyone commits a date to your client
- Cost pool structure, activity mapping and TDABC time equations
- The model built in CostCtrl on the client's own exports, no system integration required
- Customer, product, channel and contract profitability, plus the whale curve and margin cascade
- Quality assurance against a committee-grade standard, with every number traceable
- Your analysis pack, in your template, in English, Portuguese, Spanish or French
What you keep
- The client, the contract and every conversation that matters
- The read-out. We can sit behind you in the room or stay out of it entirely, your call
- Your margin, agreed as a rate card or a fixed fee per model before we start
- The right to say no to a scope we think will not stand up, which protects you as much as us
Where it fits
- Strategy, operations and restructuring practices with a margin mandate and no costing bench
- Accounting and advisory firms whose clients keep asking what a customer really costs
- ERP and BI integrators who need the cost logic that the reporting layer will display
- Private equity operating teams running the same diagnostic across several portfolio companies
Written down before anyone talks to your client.
Subcontracting only works if the boundaries are unambiguous. These are the terms we set out in the first proposal, every time.
Two ways to add TDABC to a practice. They are not the same deal.
Subcontracted delivery
- You have a live mandate and a date. You need the model built now.
- We deliver behind your brand. Your consultants are not taken off their own work.
- Priced per engagement. You can use it once and never again.
- Right when TDABC is not going to be a core service line for you.
Partner enablement
- You want profitability engineering as a permanent service line of your own.
- Your consultants are certified on the methodology and co-deliver until they run solo.
- A programme, with an enablement fee and platform terms.
- Right when you intend to sell this repeatedly, under your own bench.
Cost-model capacity is already being bought, not only hired.
Each item below is a public document with a link. None of these organisations is a client of ours and nothing here implies a relationship. They are cited because they are the published record of the demand a subcontracted practice serves: cost work procured as capacity, and savings programmes large enough that the modelling behind them is a workstream in its own right.
Published a tender in the Spanish official gazette for a two-year framework agreement supporting its analytical accounting functions, with an estimated value of EUR 832,500. This is analytical cost work bought as external capacity on a framework, rather than solved by hiring. It is the clearest published example in our current evidence pool of the buying pattern this page exists to serve.
Source: Boletín Oficial del Estado →Said in its Q2 and half-year 2026 report that it is tracking to the upper end of its EUR 800m to EUR 1.2bn gross cost savings programme, and now expects EUR 800m of restructuring charges in 2026 alone. A programme reported at that precision needs cost modelling and programme accounting running continuously beside it.
Source: company release via GlobeNewswire →Reported H1 2026 revenue of EUR 1,057m, down 18 per cent, and restated a EUR 100m savings plan to 2026 of which 92 per cent was already activated in 2025, alongside published target commitment margins by segment. Margin targets published by segment are a promise that somebody has to be able to decompose.
Source: company release via GlobeNewswire →Reported second quarter 2026 results and raised the savings target of its Project Cutting Edge efficiency programme by USD 75m to USD 475m by 2027, saying most of the new savings will come from procurement. Reallocating a target across a group of that size is cost-model work before it is a negotiation.
Source: Global Cement →Reported EUR 490m of cost savings in the first six months of 2026, roughly half its EUR 1,000m annual target, while Carrefour España turned over EUR 5,726m with an operating margin of 3.3 per cent. A savings programme of that size running against a margin that thin is a modelling workload before it is a reporting line.
Source: Revista ARAL →Stated that its programme aims for a permanent cost-base reset of approximately EUR 50m while reducing overcapacity, primarily in the consulting business. Cited here for what it says about consultancies themselves: capacity is the constraint that decides which mandates a practice can accept.
Source: company release via Cision →Two honest limits on the evidence above. First, sourcing: the Spanish framework tender is an official gazette entry and the Nokia, Nexity and Tietoevry items are company releases, but the Cemex and Carrefour items come from trade press coverage of company reporting rather than from the company's own release, and we say so rather than dress them up. Every link on this page was checked on 6 August 2026 and resolves without a paywall or a bot block, because a citation a reader or a language model cannot open is not a citation. Second, scope: our current evidence pool of 203 companies to 3 August 2026 contains no private equity disclosures at all. We deliver into PE portfolios, and that offer stands on our own record rather than on a market statistic we cannot source. We would rather say that than publish a number nobody published.
Evidence cut-off 3 Aug 2026Published 6 Aug 2026Next review 3 Feb 2027TDABC, CostCtrl and AI, because a subcontractor has to be fast and defensible at once.
You are lending us your reputation. These three things are why the model holds up when your client's CFO starts pulling on a number.
TDABC
- Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing, formalised by Kaplan and Anderson in Harvard Business Review in 2004. Not a proprietary framework with better fonts.
- Every figure traces back to an activity, a time and a rate, which is what makes it defensible in front of a committee.
- Time equations keep the driver count low enough that the client's team can maintain the model after you hand it over.
CostCtrl
- Our costing platform, which is why a diligence-grade profit map runs in weeks rather than in a quarter.
- It works from exports the client already produces, so there is no integration project standing between you and your deadline.
- Multi-entity and multi-currency, which matters when the same diagnostic runs across several portfolio companies.
AI
- Applied to the slow parts: reconciling messy financial data, drafting time equations from process descriptions, and stress-testing assumptions before your client does.
- Never applied to generating a number. The model is arithmetic on real data, and the audit trail is the deliverable.
- Our costing prompt library is public, including the part on preventing hallucinated cost figures.
What contracting firms ask us
Will you approach our client afterwards?
No, and it is written into the contract rather than left to good manners. Mutual non-solicitation for a stated period, agreed before the engagement starts. Our contract is with your firm and we neither hold nor seek one with your client.
Does your name appear on the deliverable?
Entirely your decision, stated in the proposal. Some firms want us invisible, some introduce us as their costing partner because it strengthens the mandate. Both are normal and neither changes the price.
How fast can you actually deliver?
A diligence-grade profit map runs two to four weeks from the exports the target already produces. A full model build takes longer and depends on data quality, which is why the scoping step exists: you get an honest feasibility read before you commit a date to your client, not after.
What if the client's data is a mess?
We will tell you during scoping rather than discovering it in week three. If the data cannot support a defensible model we say so and propose a narrower scope that can. Being the subcontractor who let a bad model through is not a business we want.
Can you run the same diagnostic across a portfolio?
Yes, and it is one of the better uses of the arrangement, because the second and third companies cost less than the first once the structure is set. See the portfolio scan and our private equity work for how that is shaped.
Does the client have to buy CostCtrl?
Not to receive the deliverable. The model is built in CostCtrl because that is what makes the timeline possible, and the client can take a licence afterwards to keep it live. That conversation is yours to own or to hand to us, and it does not affect the delivery fee either way.
Who is behind this?
Cost and Profitability Consulting, founded in Porto in 2010, with more than 150 cost models built across more than 30 countries. SAP selected the practice to train its own consultants twice a year across six countries between 2013 and 2020. Miguel Guimarães, the founding partner, has spent 25 or more years building cost and profitability models and leads the development of CostCtrl.
Run the Profit Check on a client situation before you scope it.
Fourteen questions, twelve to fifteen minutes, no data upload and no sales call. It scores an organisation across the seven dimensions of a cost model that works, and it is the same framework we use on day one of a delivery. Plenty of contracting firms use it as their own qualification step.
Proof
A distributor in New Zealand. €1.335M of cost-to-serve made visible, then halved, and 830 loss-making customers brought down to 295.
Read the case study →Who you would be talking to
Miguel Guimarães, Founding Partner
Cost and profitability practitioner for 25+ years. Lectured alongside Professor Robert S. Kaplan at the CFO conference in Amsterdam (2009).
Call +351 910 313 731
