Commercial management
KCPMF 1.0Commercial Pricing & Margin Optimizer
From a delivery plan to a price you can defend.
Model delivery cost, contract structure, pricing, margin, uncertainty and cash exposure before committing to the deal.
1 Commercial Analysis included
Decision framework
Know whether the deal is commercially defensible
The first screen answers one question. Everything underneath is the working, and each part answers a question a commercial director will ask.
- 01
Which contract structure fits this deal?
Twenty structures scored against this engagement's own evidence, with the leading alternatives explained in your numbers rather than in general terms.
- 02
What will it really cost, and what margin survives?
A cost distribution from fifty thousand seeded trials, not a number with a buffer added. P50, P80 and P90, and the margin each one produces.
- 03
How likely is the target margin to hold?
Counted across the simulated outcomes rather than inferred from the expected case, so it is a measurement and not a restatement.
- 04
How far can we concede in negotiation?
The floor that protects your target, the floor that protects your minimum, and exactly how much concession sits between them and the quote.
- 05
When does the cash actually arrive?
Time-phased outflow, invoicing and receipts. Payment terms move when money arrives and change gross margin by nothing, and the product says so.
- 06
Can the price be defended line by line?
Every formula published, every assumption named, every version stamped. A commercial director can reconstruct the price without the application in front of them.
Delivery evidence
It prices the evidence you actually have
Delivery evidence arrives in whatever shape your team works in. Each shape is normalised by its own rule before any commercial arithmetic runs.
No conversion is invented to make unlike units look alike.
- Person-days
- Hours
- FTE over a period
- Story points with velocity
- Allocation with an anchor
- Unit volumes
- A known cost
- A budget
Already built an Effort & Timeline estimate?
The commercial model inherits its delivery evidence, schedule and confidence, and records the exact estimate version. Revising the estimate later offers a new commercial version rather than repricing an approved one.
- 1
Delivery evidence
However your team already measures the work.
- 2
Normalised by its own rule
Converted only where a real anchor exists. Unlike units are never forced to match.
- 3
Commercial engine
Cost, rates, contract structure and margin.
- 4
Risk and scenarios
Seeded simulation, and the scenarios you choose to test.
- 5
A price you can defend
With every assumption and the model version on the record.
Commercial guardrails
What it will not do, and why that protects the quote
A quote built on an invented number cannot survive being asked where the number came from. Where the evidence cannot reach a currency value, the product says so and names the minimum that would change it.
No invented day rates
KnownShift holds no reference rate for a role and will not pretend to. Rates come from you.
No points-to-days conversion
Story points without velocity and team cost cannot become days. No constant does it honestly.
No allocation without an anchor
A percentage is a shape, not a size. It needs an absolute figure before it can be priced.
No budget treated as cost
A client budget is what they will spend, not what the work costs to deliver.
No industry-standard margin
There is not one. Your margin policy is yours, and the product does not overrule it.
Where AI is, and is not
Calculated by KnownShift, decided by you
No part of the commercial calculation uses AI. Cost rates, bill rates, discounts, budgets, margins, quotes and negotiation floors stay inside the KnownShift Commercial Engine and are never sent to a language model.
- 1
Your evidence
Delivery effort, rates and terms as you enter them, or inherited from an approved estimate.
- 2
The KnownShift engine
Deterministic arithmetic and statistical simulation produce cost, margin, risk, negotiation floors and cash exposure. The same inputs always give the same result.
- 3
Your decision
You set the assumptions, compare the scenarios and approve the version. The product recommends; it never commits you.
Pricing the engagement, or running it?
The Optimizer settles what to charge and what you can concede. Project OS connects that commercial position to the requirements, estimate and delivery plan it was priced from, so a change in scope shows up in the margin rather than being discovered at the end of it.
Evaluating this for a team? Discuss team or enterprise use with the KnownShift team.