FinanceOwner of a 5–30 person business with no finance director

When I quote for a contract, I want to know whether the price covers the real cost, so I do not take work that loses more the more we do.

Khi tôi báo giá cho một hợp đồng, tôi muốn biết mức giá đó có bù đủ chi phí thật không, để không nhận một việc làm càng nhiều càng lỗ.

Job context

Who: A services owner who quotes personally
When: While preparing a quote, usually in under a day
Trigger: A large contract ending with no money to show
Situation: Overheads do not resolve per contract, so every quote is an estimate
Constraints: Competitors quote low, and clients compare price before anything else

Does not know what an hour actually costs
High
Wages are only part; unbillable time, leave and overheads are the rest.
Root cause: Overheads are recorded at company level, not contract level
Time estimates always run short
High
Rework and scope creep never appear in the quote.
Root cause: Nobody measures actual time after a contract closes
Extra work does not become extra money
High
Additional requests arrive gradually and none is large enough to reopen the contract.
Root cause: Scope boundaries are not written specifically enough to point at
Competitors quote below cost
Medium
They may be miscalculating, and the client cannot tell.
Root cause: The whole trade is unsure of its own costs
Does not know which contracts made money
High
There is no post-mortem, so the same mistake repeats intact.
Root cause: Revenue is recorded per contract; costs are recorded per month

A solution is not the same thing as a product — a customer can hire a behaviour or a workaround too.

Project time tracking
Product
Reports hours spent, if everyone actually logs them, which they generally do not.
Industry standard rate card
Product
A useful anchor built on someone else's cost structure.
Add a buffer to the quote
Workaround
Handles uncertainty without measuring — effective, and beaten by an undercutting rival.
Ask peers what they charge
Behaviour
The commonest pricing method, and it propagates shared mistakes.
Log actual hours after the contract closes
Workaround
The one step that improves the next estimate, and almost nobody does it.

Estimates only improve when compared with actuals, and nobody records actuals after a contract closes.
Why existing solutions fail: By the time a contract closes everyone has moved on; the comparison generates no revenue and is nobody's job.
Potential opportunity: A short reconciliation attached to the final invoice, while the data is still warm.
Quoting correctly requires knowing hourly cost, which requires measuring time, which can only happen after the work.
Why existing solutions fail: Time tracking is sold for hourly billing, so fixed-price businesses have no reason to use it — and they are the ones who most need the number.
Potential opportunity: Measuring time coarsely, enough to derive an hourly cost, without per-person per-task logging.