REAL-TIME COST VISIBILITY
See What the Work Is Costing Before the Project Is Over.
Most systems can tell you what a project cost once it is finished. Bikabo tells you what the work already underway is going to cost if it becomes payable, while there is still time to do something about it.
THREE FIGURES, NOT ONE
Why One Cost Number Is Not Enough.
Work that has been done, work that has been confirmed as owed, and money that has actually left the business are three different facts. Blending them into a single cost figure hides the one that is still moving.
Pending Cost Exposure
The estimated cost of measurable work that is logged or underway but not yet approved. It is what you would owe if the work in flight were approved as it stands.
Calculated live from the work itself, never stored. It is provisional by definition, so a saved figure would start being wrong the moment anything moved.
Approved Cost
Cost that has been confirmed as payable, because the work passed review and was approved. This is what the business genuinely owes its team for the work so far.
Net of corrections. A reversal or a recovery on a corrected Task reduces it rather than leaving an inflated total standing.
Paid Cost
Money that has actually been paid out to the team. Approving a payout and paying it are two separate, separately recorded steps.
Approved but unpaid work sits between the two, which is exactly the gap a business needs to be able to see.
Cost Comes From the Work, Not From a Separate Spreadsheet.
Nobody has to remember to update a cost tracker. A Task is assigned, work is logged against it, a Checker reviews it, and an Admin approves it. Cost forms along that path on its own, because the compensation agreement that applies to that work is already recorded.
Which agreement applies is resolved in a fixed order, from the most specific to the most general: a rate set on this particular Task, then one set for this Type of Work inside this Engagement, then the Engagement, then the Type of Work, then the business-wide default. A special rate for one Task does not require rewriting anything else.
Confirmed Margin and Exposure Margin.
Two margin figures, kept apart deliberately. Blending them into one projected margin was a real bug in an earlier version of the product, because the blended number hid which half was still provisional.
Confirmed Margin
Current Agreement Value - Approved Team Cost
What the Engagement has made so far on cost that is settled. Every figure in it has passed review.
Exposure Margin
Current Agreement Value - Approved Team Cost - Pending Cost Exposure
The same Engagement once the work already in flight is counted. This is the number that moves first when an Engagement starts going wrong.
Cash Position
Client Cash Received - Team Cash Actually Paid
A different question entirely. An Engagement can be profitable and short of cash, or flush and unprofitable, at the same time.
A Worked Example.
Two Engagements can show the same apparent margin and be in completely different states. The difference is the work that is already underway.
The first figure is the one most systems can produce. The second is the one that tells you whether to act.
| Agreed Client Value | 10,000 |
| Approved Cost | 5,000 |
| Confirmed Margin | 5,000 |
| Pending Cost Exposure | 2,000 |
| Exposure Margin | 3,000 |
The 2,000 is not a guess. It is work that has already been logged against open Tasks, priced at the rates that currently apply to it.
Additional Work Is Where Margin Usually Goes.
Engagements rarely fail on the work that was planned. They fail on the work nobody planned: the extra round, the discovered problem, the small favour that took two days.
In Bikabo, work is either Planned or Additional, and the distinction is recorded when the work is created rather than reconstructed afterwards. Unplanned Tasks surface with their estimated cost before anyone approves them, so scope growth is visible while it is happening.
What Bikabo will not do is quietly raise what the Client owes. Adjusting the Agreement is a separate, deliberate act, and the original agreed figure stays on the record next to the new one.
Profitability Is Not Cash Position.
These two questions get blended constantly, and the blend is what produces a profitable business that cannot pay its team this month.
Profitability asks
Did this Engagement earn more than it cost to deliver?
Built from the Agreement and from team cost, whether or not any of it has been settled in cash.
Cash position asks
How much has actually come in, minus how much has actually gone out?
Built from Client payments received and staff payments made. Both figures are real money that has moved.
Changing a Rate Today Does Not Rewrite Yesterday.
Financial history in Bikabo is append-only. Earnings are never edited in place: a correction is a new entry linked to the one it corrects, and whether it is a reversal or a recovery depends on whether the original had already been paid out.
Compensation agreements work the same way. You do not edit a rate, you end an agreement and start another, so the work approved under the old one keeps costing what it cost.
More Than One Currency.
An Engagement billed in one currency can be delivered by a team paid in another, so cost and revenue on the same piece of work do not always share a unit.
Bikabo converts using rates you configure, snapshotted onto each transaction when it is recorded rather than recalculated later. Editing a rate affects what is recorded afterwards, never what is already on the books. A transaction in a currency with no configured rate is recorded exactly as it happened and left out of converted totals, rather than being converted at a guess.
What This Is Not.
Being specific about the edges is what makes the rest of this page worth trusting.
- No cost forecasting model, and no prediction of where an Engagement will land.
- No configurable margin threshold that raises an alert on its own.
- No automatic halt on work that has gone over budget. Bikabo shows you; the decision stays yours.
- No general ledger, no bank reconciliation, no tax accounting.
- Fixed-period compensation, such as a monthly retainer for a team member, is not spread across individual Tasks. Allocating it by an arbitrary formula would produce a per-Task cost figure that looks precise and means nothing.
Questions About Cost Tracking
No. It contains no prediction and no model. It is the arithmetic consequence of work that has already been logged or started, priced at the compensation agreement that currently applies to it. If nobody logs work, exposure does not move.
Not necessarily. Work can be compensated per unit, per hour, per task, weekly, biweekly, monthly or as a fixed amount for a whole Engagement. Cost comes from whichever agreement applies to that work, so a business that does not run on timesheets still gets a real cost figure.
Nothing. The rate that applied is recorded onto the ledger entry when the work is approved, and compensation agreements are never edited in place. Changing a rate ends the old agreement and starts a new one, so history keeps saying what it said.
No, and it should not. Additional Work is an operational fact: your team found more work and logged it. Whether the client pays more for it is a commercial conversation, recorded separately as an adjustment to the Agreement. Bikabo keeps the two apart so scope growth is visible before it is negotiated.
Not today. Bikabo shows the figures as they move and surfaces unplanned work on the dashboard with its estimated cost, but there is no configurable margin threshold that triggers an alert. That is on the roadmap, not in the product.
No. Bikabo tracks the operational economics around client work: what the work costs, what clients owe, what the team is owed. It does not do general ledger accounting, bank reconciliation or tax reporting, and it does not connect to a bank feed.