Each person around a deal asks a different question, and each gets an answer before the deal is signed.
Margin is made in two places: the price you pay suppliers and the price you charge customers. Here is one moment in each of their jobs, and what the platform puts in front of them. Each role sees its own side, and the CFO sees both.
Tuesday, 8.40am. Two hundred and fourteen purchase orders are waiting for sign-off. Eleven break a rule, and those are the only ones on your screen, each with the money and the fix.
Which deals change EBITDA this month, and what should my team do about them?
- Sign off two hundred purchase orders a week, and see only the ones that break a rule, each with its verdict, its effect on EBITDA and the fix
- Margin on every customer contract at bid and today, with the contracts in the action zone named
- Savings identified, agreed and banked in EBITDA, against last quarter
- Every action with a named owner and a date
A supplier renewal rolls over in 31 days. Twelve months of its invoices have already been checked against the supplier contract, and the negotiation briefing is ready before you open the email.
Are our purchase orders going out at the contract terms, and which savings are banked?
- A verdict on every purchase order and supplier contract before approval, the same verdicts the CFO sees
- Purchase orders held to the supplier contract price and terms, so leakage stops before it is paid
- Supplier invoices already checked against the supplier contract before each renewal
- Savings ranked by size and ease, and every initiative tracked until it is banked in EBITDA
Banked means it shows in the invoices you paid, so it counts in EBITDA.
Sales hits its target, procurement hits its target, and four years later the contract loses money. Nobody sits across all three.
Nobody did a bad job. It is a structural gap, and it is the one the platform closes. One minute.
A quote for a three-year supply agreement goes out at five. Before it leaves, it is checked against the supplier costs underneath it and the terms of the customer contract.
Will this quote, renewal or sales order still make money when supplier costs move?
- A verdict on every customer contract and renewal: whether it makes money, its effect on EBITDA and the clause to add
- The price buffer each quote needs, from the market outlook for the costs underneath it
- Quotes and sales orders checked before they go out, at the right price and in line with the customer contract (roadmap Q1 2027)
- Every price rise the customer contract allows billed, so everything you are owed can be claimed
Quarterly portfolio review. Twelve companies on one page, and the contracts in each that decide whether the value creation plan lands.
Where is margin won across the portfolio, and which companies are ahead of plan?
- A cube of cubes: each company's spend, contracts and margin rolled up into one portfolio view
- Opportunities across the portfolio, such as suppliers several companies share and could buy from together
- Margin against plan for every company, so you can see who is ahead and where help is needed
- A fixed price per company, the same platform everywhere
The board asks what AI is in production. You open Cassian, ask a question nobody prepared for, and show where every figure came from.
Can we trust its numbers at our scale, and how fast can we build on it?
- 100% of figures traced to your own data before they are shown, and anything untraced removed
- Agents live with clients on more than 100 million transactions, across many ERPs at once
- An MCP server, so Copilot, ChatGPT, Gemini and your own agents use the same cleaned data and the same numbers
- A fast start for your AI programme, with the next use cases built on data that is already clean
The board pack asks one thing: are our prices keeping up with our costs? One page answers it, contract by contract, with what is being done about each gap.
Are our customer prices staying ahead of our supplier cost increases?
- Customer price increases against supplier cost increases, on one chart
- The contracts where costs have moved ahead of prices, and what is being done about each one
- EBITDA against plan, with the same numbers the CFO sees, never a separate pack
Your costs change more often than your customer's price, so margin moves on both sides of every deal.
Use this section with your CFO, your commercial director or your board. It explains the problem in one picture, shows where margin leaks, and lists the only five ways to fix it.
Negotiating hard with suppliers protects your cost. Your margin only holds if the price you charge your customer moves too.
Procurement can see it coming: the index, the reset date and the rate in the supplier contract.
Unless someone tells sales and pricing, the customer price stays where the bid put it.
Margin is two-sided. Work on it with sales and pricing, not just on your own costs.
Twenty places margin leaks. Most businesses have four or five of them.
The first two columns are what the paper says. The third is whether anyone follows it, before and after signature. The fourth is what happens when the relationship is tested. Tick the ones you recognise.
If yours is not on here, tell us and it goes on the list, because this map has grown before. You can have the best contract in the world and still lose the margin, because nobody checks the next order against it.
Whatever we find, there are only five ways to fix it.
Most of what we find is in the wording of the contracts themselves.
It is not only metals. The same four things happen on energy, freight, labour, packaging, tariffs and currency: wherever a cost moves on someone else's timetable and your price does not.
