Margin and pool lenses

Margin and commitment pools are views over the same lines, not a kind of drift. They never enter the Ledger or change your net number.

Margin and commitment pools are lenses: different ways of looking at the same lines you already reconcile. They're for pricing and buying conversations, not for billing corrections, so they never enter the Ledger and never change your net-drift number. A figure in a lens always reads a step quieter than found money, so the two can't be confused.

What you're looking at

• A commitment pool shows committed seats against what's actually assigned. The filled part of the bar is used; the rest is idle headroom you've already paid for. Idle seats are valued at cost (and labeled approximate), because the cost is sunk whether or not you use them.
• Margin is what you make on what you bill: the sell price minus the cost, per product and per client. Where no cost is on file, BillRecon shows a dash, never a fake "$0".

The two lenses

• Margin (the Margin book) lists your products with billed, cost, margin, and margin percent, thinnest margins first. The same product sold at very different margins across clients is a re-pricing conversation. Add cost rates on a client's margin lens to fill in any dashes.
• Pools (commitment pools) shows each annual or multi-year pool as a utilization bar, with the idle headroom valued at cost. A locked pool is marked, because its waste is committed until the term renews.

Behind the margin numbers is a vendor-cost view: what each vendor charges you, per product. It's the cost side of every margin, and it's where an unexpected vendor price increase shows up first (and what a vendor cost increase alert points you to).

Your options

• Re-price where margin is thin, using the per-client breakdown.
• Onboard into idle seats you've already committed to, at no extra marginal cost, rather than buying more.