KnownShift Decisions
Individual accessFixed-Price Margin Rescue
Your project can be on schedule and still be losing margin.
See where your fixed-price project is heading, quantify the margin gap, and compare realistic rescue paths before the economics become irreversible.
The analysis and the report are produced in your browser. Access belongs to your KnownShift account, so it follows you between devices.
Illustrative result
- 32.0%
- Original gross margin
- 26.7%
- Forecast gross margin
- ₹4,85,715
- Revenue to restore a 30% margin
- 243 hours
- Or remaining effort removed
Margin gap to target: -3.3 pts. No single lever closes it within the limits entered; a lower delivery rate and 93 fewer hours together do.
Example figures from the worked example, shown to illustrate the output. Your analysis is calculated from your own project.
Individual access, bought once. Analyse as many projects and rescue scenarios as you need, save them, and download the report on every one.
Fixed-price revenue stands still. Delivery cost does not.
The price was settled at signature. Every hour of rework, every defect cycle and every underestimated task since then has come straight out of the margin, and nothing on the revenue side announces it. By the time the variance shows up in a monthly report, most of the budget that could have fixed it has been spent.
What it answers
- Where is my margin heading?
- What is my estimate at completion?
- How much margin have I lost since pricing?
- How much additional revenue would restore my target?
- How much cost or effort reduction would do the same?
- Can the target still be recovered at all?
How it works
- 1
Enter the baseline economics
The contract value, the delivery cost it was priced on, and the margin you want to protect.
- 2
Add actual spend and the remaining forecast
Cost to date, work completion, remaining effort and rate, and any known rework.
- 3
Define realistic rescue limits
The revenue you could recover, the effort you could remove, the rate you could reach.
- 4
Compare rescue paths
Each lever alone and in combination, and an honest answer where the target is out of reach.
What you receive
A quantified rescue decision, not a margin percentage
Everything a commercial recovery conversation needs, in the order it is asked for.
- Forecast gross margin
- Where the margin lands if delivery continues as forecast, against what was priced.
- ETC and EAC
- What is still to spend and what the project will have cost when it finishes.
- Margin bridge
- Why the margin moved: cost pressure to date, the remaining forecast, rework and approved change.
- Revenue gap
- The additional revenue that restores your target, calculated as margin, not markup.
- Cost and effort gap
- The delivery cost, and the hours of remaining effort, that would do the same.
- Absorbable effort
- How much more effort the project can take before it falls below your margin floor.
- Rescue options compared
- Commercial, delivery and cost-rate recovery within your limits, alone and combined.
- Why this result
- The exact path the model took, in your own figures, including what it rejected.
- Fixed-Price Margin Rescue Report
- A concise document to take into the commercial conversation.
Methodology
Standard project economics, run on your own numbers
Gross margin, estimate at completion and cost performance are the plumbing. What the utility does with them is the point: translate the gap into what would close it, then compare only the rescue levers you say are realistic.
Structured commercial modelling, not generative AI. The same inputs always produce the same answer, including the order the rescue options appear in.
View methodology for the full framework, the formulas and what the model does not claim.
- Project gross margin
- Revenue less direct delivery cost, over revenue. Markup is shown for reference and never substituted.
- Estimate at completion
- Actual cost to date plus the remaining forecast, including known unplanned effort.
- Approved against pending
- Approved change revenue counts in the forecast. Pending value never does until it is approved.
- Target economics
- Revenue required from gross-margin algebra; cost and effort reduction against the allowable cost.
- Cost performance
- Earned value against actual cost, shown as a supporting signal and never confused with margin.
- Bounded rescue
- Only the levers you supply, within your limits, solved exactly rather than searched at random.
- Dominance filtering
- Options that need more of every lever for no more margin are removed rather than listed.
- Honest impossibility
- Where the target is out of reach, the best achievable margin and the gap still to find.
Questions
What people ask before buying this
Short, practical answers about what the utility needs from you and what it gives back.
Before you buy
Using the utility
Margin and schedule usually slip together.
Fixed-Price Margin Rescue tells you what the project's economics need. The Delay & Recovery Simulator tells you what a slipped activity has actually done to the completion date, and what recovering it would cost.
Evaluating this for a team? Discuss team or enterprise use with the KnownShift team.