Use case 05Margin blind spots
Know what it costs before you quote it.
A year’s cost inflation on a stale rate table, a 10.7% average project overrun, and the losing practice hidden inside the winning one.
Quoting blind. Landed cost per load and cost-to-complete per project come from the live record, so the CFO and CRO seats re-price before the next quote.
01 · The problem
The real cost of a load or a project shows up weeks after it ends, in a monthly statement that averages everything together. By then the next one has been quoted on the same stale numbers.
02 · In practice
A lane is priced from last year’s rate table while fuel, tolls, insurance and maintenance have moved. The brokerage desk books at a margin the fleet’s true cost per mile has already erased. Nobody knows which customer, lane or truck makes money until the quarter closes.
A fixed-fee engagement is quoted from the last one’s hours. The subcontractor invoice and the change order land in different systems. Utilization is averaged across the firm, so the losing practice hides inside the winning one.
03 · Where today’s tools stop
The transportation system prices the load from a rate table; fuel, tolls, insurance, maintenance and driver cost arrive weeks later in the ledger. The services tool reports hours against budget, but the subcontractor invoice and the change order sit elsewhere. The monthly statement arrives after the close as a whole-company average, not a per-load or per-project margin.
04 · What it costs today
billable utilization across professional services, against a 75% optimum.
of small firms saw the price of imported inputs rise in 2025.
05 · What Velenza does
Landed cost per load and cost-to-complete per project are computed from the live record. The CFO and CRO seats re-price before the next quote, and the COO seat sees which lane, practice or person is carrying the margin.
In the room
06 · What it is worth
- Logistics floor: a rate table that lags cost by a year eats the year’s inflation. On $11.7 million of fleet operating cost, 3.4% is about $398,000 a year.
- Services typical: each point of billable utilization on sixty billable staff is about $180,000 of revenue a year; the gap between the 2025 average and the optimum is 8.6 points.
Estimates with the arithmetic shown, on the reference companies described in the use-case brief. Never a measured result; your figures come from your record.
07 · Beyond logistics and services
Construction (job costing), manufacturing (cost to serve), healthcare practices (payer mix and cost per visit), any firm that quotes before it knows its cost.
This is the steady state: knowing the margin of the next quote. A business that moves as one is the exception: acting in hours when the margin, the capacity and the customer line up at once.
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Tell us which systems hold the pieces today, and we will show you what the eleven say when they read them together.