Accordia - per-project margin from the records you already keep
You already sent the quote.
You can't take it back.
You priced it off the last one like it. That number was built from whatever had reached you by then, and things were still landing.
A vendor bill sitting in an inbox. A card charge that was this one, or the one you ran the same week, and nobody checked. Hours you were still waiting on a text for. Half of it in a spreadsheet somebody started and left. A supplier bill that made it into your books with no job on it at all.
You used the number anyway. Monday was coming. And you already knew some of it was missing.
Call it whatever you call it
A job. A work order. A repair order. A matter, an event, an engagement. The word changes with the trade. The shape does not.
The work is finished. The money that went into it came from more than one direction.
And the next one has to be priced from what the last one actually returned, which is the one number nobody handed you.
One of them
You get a number. You have never once been sure it was right.
Sunday afternoon, three weeks after you closed it out.
You pull the invoice out of QuickBooks. You go looking for the vendor bills you think belong to this one. You find three. You are fairly sure there was a fourth. You dig through the folder for the material receipts. You text someone about the hours, and they get back to you Monday.
A card charge from a supplier shows up. It could be this one. It could be the one you ran the same week. You pick one.
You add it up. You get a number.
You have never once been sure that number was right.
Then Monday comes and there is a quote to write, so you use it. Not because you trust it. Because it is what you have, and the window is closing.
Now do that for a year
That was one of them. You ran dozens more, or hundreds, and you never went back to most of them. There was no Sunday left over for the rest.
Your books are right. Your accountant is not missing anything. Every dollar you spent last year is in there, in the correct month, on the correct line. Which piece of work each of those dollars belonged to is a different question, and nothing you run answers it. You are not bad at pricing. You are pricing from evidence that was never assembled for that decision.
And the ones that cost you are not the ones you would name.
The bad ones announced themselves, and you remember those. The expensive ones are the ones that looked fine, because the cost that would have changed the picture had not landed yet, or landed with nothing on it that said where it belonged. Those are the ones you priced the next three quotes from.
None of that stops
What changes is when you find out.
There is no version of this where the bills start arriving on time with a reference on them. The one that is late will still be late. The card charge will still be a card charge. Connecting something does not change how your suppliers invoice you or how your crew buys parts on a Tuesday.
Right now you find out too late to use it. On a Sunday. Or the day a piece of work you were proud of turns out to have been carrying a cost you never saw. Or never. The next quote is already written by then.
You send the next one either way. The only thing that moves is whether you can see what is missing before it goes out, or after. That is the thing worth fighting for, and it is the thing the rest of this page is about.
The job you already closed
Take the one you finished in February. It looked fine the day you closed it, and it still looks fine on Monday, when the next quote like it is due. So you reach for it. It is the closest thing to an answer you have.
Then the supplier bill turns up in May, months after the work, the way that supplier always sends it. It belongs to February. Nothing on it says so. With nothing watching for it, February stays the number you remember, the one you reach for on Monday and on the next three Mondays after that. The bill is in your books, correct to the dollar. The job it paid for never hears about it.
Accordia hears about it. The day that bill lands, the February job stops being the number you closed and becomes the number it actually cost.
It shows what moved, what is in it now, and what is still open. If it has not settled enough to lean on, it says so. The cost that arrived with nothing on it, Accordia does not fold quietly into the total to keep the figure looking finished, and does not count as a zero. It sets it in front of you, as missing, where you can still do something about it.
It does not tell you what to charge. It makes sure the job you are about to price from is the one that happened, not the cleaner one you saw before the rest of the cost came in.
That is what Accordia is. It reads the work you already finished, from the records you already keep, and tells you what each piece of it actually earned. Then it keeps telling you, because the cost does not all arrive at once.
The next one like it
Which number do you price the next one from?
You already priced the next three quotes off the 31%. You won them. You'll run them at 9%.
You're about to reach for the 31% again. The bill that used to surface in May now surfaces the day it lands, on the job it belongs to, so the job you're reaching for already reads 9%. The one that looked like your best work was the one quietly costing you the most, on every quote you built off it. You catch it here, while you can still do something about it.
That job did not stand out. It looked like the rest of them, right up until the cost came in, which means it is not the only one on your book sitting there looking better than it earned. If someone asked you to name those jobs, you would name the wrong ones. The loud failures you remember. The quiet ones you price the next bids from, and the only way to see which is which is to look at your own.
What the number comes with
A clean number that hides what is missing is worse than an honest one that shows you the gaps.
A margin you can defend beats one that flatters you. Every tool that hands you a tidy figure for everything is one you already learned not to trust, because you know what it painted over to keep the figure looking finished.
So a number from Accordia arrives with the account of itself. What went into it. What is still open, carried as a range, never counted as a zero to make it look done. What could not be tied to any one piece of work, sitting where you can see it instead of buried inside a total. It will not hand you a clean number it does not have, and that refusal is the reason you can stand behind the one it does hand you.
The smallest change you can make
Here is what trying this asks you to change about how you work: nothing.
You keep QuickBooks. You keep your accountant. You keep the Sunday spreadsheet if you still want it, though this is the thing that was supposed to replace that Sunday. There is no migration, no new app, no new process, no second place to key what you already entered once. Nobody has to run anything in the field. The way tomorrow's work gets recorded stays exactly the way it is today. The only new thing is the answer, and it arrives before the next quote.
That is the trade on the table. The smallest change you can make, against the biggest question you have never been able to answer. You have priced from gut for years and you are still here, and that is worth saying plainly: gut got you this far. But gut was reading the same flattering number you were, the one built before the last cost came in. This does not ask you to price differently. It asks you to price from what actually happened.
And it stays read-only. Accordia reads your QuickBooks. It does not write to it, it does not change anything in it, and it does not move a dollar. Your accountant stays your accountant, and the books stay theirs to run. No number here is produced by an AI. Arithmetic and your own word build every one. Ask what to charge and you get a range and the arithmetic under it, never a price. And if you ever leave, the corrected numbers leave with you. They were always yours.
The next quote goes out either way. What changes is that you can finally see which of the jobs behind it are safe to trust, and price this one from those.