True Cost Control

Landed-cost intelligence

See every cost.
Protect every margin.

True Cost Control turns product costing — FOB to freight, duties to royalties, components to shelf price — into one live, governed system. Every number traceable. Every change reviewed.

Book a walkthrough See how it works

The problem

Spreadsheet costing breaks exactly when it matters most

Import-driven businesses run their most consequential numbers through chains of linked workbooks only one or two people fully understand.

Fragile lookup chains

Cost-per-SKU to raw materials to BOM to finished goods, held together by lookups that break silently when a row moves.

Rules that live in someone's head

Which brands carry royalties, when transfer fees apply, which components pay duty — tribal knowledge, not system logic.

No trail, no control

A price change happens in a cell. Who approved it? Who was told? What did it used to be? The spreadsheet doesn't know.

Shock-blind

A new tariff or freight spike means days of manual rework across hundreds of SKUs — after the exposure has already hit.

“I keep the status in the product's name so I don't forget which numbers aren't final.” — every costing analyst, everywhere

The platform

One live system of record for product cost

01

Model

A formula-driven cost engine mirrors your real cost structure — every fee, factor and margin defined once, applied everywhere.

02

Decide

Simulations show the full catalog impact of any change before you commit — tariffs, freight, FX, vendor quotes.

03

Govern

Configurable review workflows relay every change through the right people, with notifications, audit history and automatic archiving.

Capabilities

What the platform does

Core cost engine

Your cost structure, encoded once.

  • Formula-driven cost types. FOB, discounts, license fees, ocean freight, duty, tariff, landed cost, margins — each a defined type with its own formula and unit.
  • Cost profiles by brand class. Branded, house-brand, licensed, private-label: each profile carries its own fee rules. Add a brand and every product costs correctly, automatically.
  • Effective-dated everything. Plan next quarter's increase today; history stays intact and the timeline shows every value that ever was.
  • Backwards visibility. Start from any number — landed, list, net, retail — and trace exactly which inputs produced it.

BOM intelligence

Finished goods that always know what they're made of.

  • Permanent cost connection. When a component's cost moves, every finished good that uses it moves with it.
  • Brand-aware roll-ups. Royalties and transfer fees land where they belong — on the component for branded parts, on the finished good for house brands. Never doubled.
  • Raw-material and finished-good cost at once. The same item can sell on its own and ship inside a kit; TCC keeps both costs correctly.
  • The BOM card. An invoice-style breakdown per finished good — every component's cost, freight and quantity, each line clickable into its own full costing.

Simulations

Answer “what if” before it costs you.

  • Scoped scenarios. Target by vendor, brand, country, category, HTS code or cost profile.
  • General cost overlays. Change one assumption — a duty rate, a container price — and watch it cascade through every dependent formula.
  • Compare and decide. Every simulated value shown against current, with net and percentage change.
  • Publish with governance. Committing a simulation applies the change and routes it into review — modelling and execution are one motion.

Change review workflows

Every change relayed through the right hands.

  • Configurable relay. Steps assigned to roles or named people, with review gates, acknowledgements and a final archive step that closes the loop.
  • Smart routing. Route by brand, cost profile or which costs changed — branded items to one team, house brands to another, automatically.
  • Parallel steps. Independent teams work simultaneously instead of daisy-chained; the change closes when the last one finishes.
  • My Tasks. Each person sees exactly what is waiting on them, one click from the action, with a history of everything they have approved.

Data, access & governance

Nothing silent in. Nothing leaks out.

  • Staged imports. Excel price lists land in a staging area — reviewed, adjusted and approved product-by-product before touching live costs.
  • Vendor red-flags. A file claiming one vendor's price list but targeting another vendor's item stops the import cold, with the exact rows named.
  • Cell-level status. Flag any number as target, needs-confirmation or final — colour-coded in the grid, not buried in a product name.
  • Per-cost-type visibility. Sales sees prices and margins; purchasing sees FOB and freight; every export carries only the columns that user may see.
  • Walk in their shoes. Admins impersonate any role to verify precisely what that team sees and can do — before rollout, not after complaints.

Customer-specific pricing Next release

Every retailer's price, tracked like a cost.

  • Per-customer price layers. Programs, allowances and negotiated rates modelled as customer-specific cost types, not side spreadsheets.
  • Margin by customer. Margin per retailer per SKU against live landed cost — know instantly which accounts a cost increase squeezes, and by how much.
  • Price history that answers questions. What did this account pay last season, and when did it change?
  • Sales-team import/export. Import customer price sheets through the same staged pipeline; export clean per-retailer lists shaped for each account.

Why True Cost Control

From tribal spreadsheets to a governed cost engine

Hours to minutes

to price a tariff shock across the full catalog

One source

of costing truth — no more duelling workbooks

Zero silent changes

every cost movement reviewed, relayed and recorded

Your brand

white-label ready: your name, your identity, your workflow rules

True Cost Control is a proven platform — built on modern Microsoft technology (.NET, Blazor, Azure SQL) and refined in production against real import volumes and real bills of materials.

Engagement

From discovery to go-live in weeks, not quarters

  1. 1

    Discover 2–3 weeks

    Map your cost structure, brand classes, roles and approval chain onto the engine.

  2. 2

    Configure 3–5 weeks

    Your label, cost types, profiles, workflows and import formats — configuration, not custom code.

  3. 3

    Validate 2–3 weeks

    Parallel-run against your current spreadsheets until every number reconciles.

  4. 4

    Launch ongoing

    Training, go-live and hypercare — then quarterly releases from the shared roadmap.

Platform license

Annual white-label license: your brand, unlimited workflows, all core modules and every roadmap release — including the customer-pricing module.

Implementation

Fixed-fee configuration engagement covering discovery through launch, with reconciliation against your existing costing as the acceptance test.

Success & support

SLA-backed support, managed upgrades and optional feature sprints for capabilities specific to your business.

Commercial terms are sized to catalog volume and seat count during discovery — one page, no surprises.

See it against your own numbers

The most useful first conversation is a walkthrough with one of your own cost structures on screen. Bring a product, a BOM, and the tariff question you are worried about.