Sales Profitability & Margin Guardian · Wisdom notebook
Ask the follow-up.
Agentic conversational BI · one thread down the margin ledger — where the cents go, and which of them are yours to move.
Contribution margin per unit is down across the book this period. Before I take it to anybody — how much of that is even a commercial lever?
RKSplit the ledger at the contribution-margin line: the buckets above it — revenue, deductions, material cost and direct cost excluding material — against the components below it, which are additive cost, compliance cost and plant overhead. Then scored where margin movement has historically landed.
Almost all of it, and that is not an accident of this period. Roughly nineteen cases in twenty land above the CM line, where sales, promotions and procurement each own a bucket. What sits below it is tracked but is not yours:
Where margin movement lands, either side of the contribution-margin line
Which is why the ledger is read at the contribution-margin line and every escalation starts there. A move below the line is real and is worth telling plant management about, but a commercial team has no lever on plant overhead — and reading the two together is how a margin note ends up addressed to nobody.
Freight cost per unit — where are we paying more to ship an order than we billed for it, and how much does that vary by destination?
RKCompared freight cost per unit against the freight billed out to the customer, by region and territory, and ranked destinations by that gap rather than by the freight bill itself — an expensive destination that is priced correctly is not a problem.
Freight per unit runs three to five times higher on the most distant destinations than on nearby ones, and where the sell price does not carry that difference the margin on those orders is subsidising the distance:
The distance tax · freight paid against freight billed
Freight billed to the customer and freight paid to the carrier are two different lines in the ledger, and only their spread is the freight margin. Ranking accounts on contribution margin after freight rather than before it moves accounts that looked healthy down the list — which is the point of asking.
Deductions per unit moved on the book this period. Which sub-component is it, and does that move mean anything yet?
RKBroke the deductions line into its own sub-components — accruals, quantity and cash discounts, free goods, customer and material discounts, bad debt — because they have different owners and only some of them are spend at all.
It depends entirely on which sub-component moved, and one of them means nothing yet. Accruals are future promotional commitments booked now, so a spike there can be a timing catch-up rather than new give-away:
The deductions line, by sub-component · what a move means and who owns it
| Sub-component | What a move in it means | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Accruals | Future promotional commitments booked now — may be a timing catch-up, not new spend | Finance |
| Quantity, cash & customer discounts | Real give-away; test it against break-even uplift, not against gross volume lift | Promotions |
| Free goods | The same give-away with no price attached to compare it to | Promotions |
| Material discount | A product-level concession — check it against that material's own CM per unit | Promotions |
| Bad debt | A credit-risk signal wearing a margin costume — it is not a promotional decision | Finance |
On an accruals move the honest answer is "not yet": watch the next two periods for payouts against the commitment. Payouts mean a real promotion and the break-even test applies — the uplift has to cover the deduction dollars at the pre-promotion CM per unit. No payouts means it was a booking date, and escalating that as erosion is how a margin alert stops being believed.