Cost at the unit · what every number is built from
Rate card and meters
12 rates price every one of the 10,939 cost lines behind the outcome unit costs. Each declares on the record which of three tiers it belongs to, what basis it is apportioned on, who owns it and how much confidence that owner places in it. Loaded rates, license costs and overhead bases are the customer’s figures, and no customer figure has been supplied. Every rate on these pages is a modeled composite: a plausible number of the right order for a group of this size, not a number taken from a payroll run, a vendor contract or a general ledger. Until the real rates arrive, this wave demonstrates the instrument and proves nothing about the business case. That is the same statement the benefit pages make, and it is not softened here.
Every rate, and what it is made of
Sorted as they are applied. The bar is the share of the priced sample that rate carries.
Moving a line from estimated to metered
8 pieces of tracked work, one for each of the 8 rates without a meter. Each names an owner, an effort and a target.
The single highest-value move on this ladder. Until it lands, every labor line in the product is a market composite and the fully loaded unit cost cannot be defended in front of a controller.
Blocked: Works council consultation in two markets has not concluded, so per-person cost cannot leave the payroll system in any form that supports a rate.
Moving this from estimated to apportioned does not make it metered, and the ladder should not pretend otherwise. It makes the basis auditable, which is the honest ceiling for an overhead line.
The recharge already exists in the general ledger. The work is agreeing the driver, not finding the number.
Two of the five contracts contain transaction bands that would support a genuine per-stage charge. The other three are flat enterprise agreements and will stay apportioned whatever is done.
This is a commercial negotiation rather than an engineering task, and four of the ten renewals fall outside the current planning horizon.
The tagging is straightforward. The value is not the dollars, which are small, but that it removes an allocation from the middle of the chain.
The rate is only half the labor line. A flat eleven minutes per touch is doing as much damage to the unit cost as the composite hourly rate, and nothing in the ledger currently exposes that.
A low-effort improvement that only becomes worth doing once the payroll extract lands, because splitting a composite more finely does not make it less of a composite.
The same ladder in the existing spend ledger
The cost pages already carry a basis field on every recorded spend line. It tells the same story from the other end.
Actions
What is waiting on a person
Each count below is a rate or a piece of metering work that decides whether a cost line is a measurement or an assumption. Moving one line up the ladder changes every unit cost that uses it.
Reconcile an estimated line in the spend ledger
The existing spend ledger carries these on an estimated basis, 50.5 percent of recorded spend, and its basis field maps one to one onto its category field.
Replace a rate the owner does not believe
These rates carry an owner confidence below 0.50, which means the person named against them would not defend the number in a review.
Start a metering task nobody has picked up
Named, owned and sized, but not begun. Together they govern $1.2m a week of estate cost that stays assumed until they do.
Clear a blocked metering task
Work is stopped behind something outside the owner’s control, holding $638k a week on an estimated rate.
Name an owner for an unmetered rate with no task
Every unmetered rate has exactly one named piece of work against it.
Operations
What this desk is allowed to start
A surface that only reports is not operable. This is the work this page can set in motion, and the bound it runs into.
Trigger and bound
This page can publish every rate the unit costs are built from, state its tier and its apportionment basis on the record, name the person who owns it and the confidence they place in it, and track the work that would move a rate from estimated to metered. It cannot meter anything: no connector is attached to a payroll system, a vendor contract or a metering endpoint, so every tier change here is a piece of scheduled work rather than a switch.
Live observability
What the record shows right now
The metering backlog by state, an exhaustive partition of all 8 tasks into 3 states: every task carries exactly one. There is one task for each of the 8 rates that has no meter, and none for the 4 that already do.
Current distribution
8 metering tasks
Is policy and strategy coming to fruition
Whether the written intent is holding here
8 of the 12 rates have no meter behind them, and they carry 94.1 percent of the priced sample.
Not holding on the record
The position this layer exists to test is that a cost line should declare its own evidence, and that the mix should be a headline rather than a method note. The declaration holds: every one of the 10,939 cost lines carries a tier, and every rate names an owner, a basis and a confidence. What the declaration reveals is uncomfortable. 42.6 percent of the lines are metered and they carry 5.9 percent of the money, so the reassuring count and the load-bearing dollars point in opposite directions. 5 rates carry an owner confidence below 0.50 and mean confidence across all 12 is 0.60. The backlog that would fix it is real but small: 8 tasks governing $2.7m a week, of which 3 are moving, 1 is blocked and 4 have not started. The existing spend ledger tells the same story from the other end: 37.3 percent of recorded spend is metered by value against 35.2 percent by record count, and its basis field turns out to be a relabeling of its category field rather than an independent judgment. The intent is holding on the disclosure and not on the evidence.