We call it contribution, because it is not profit
A statement shows what was invoiced, what arrived, and what the AI cost. It does not call the difference profit, because that would ignore the largest cost in a bid-writing business: the writer’s own time.
Every engagement has a statement: the work delivered in the period, what was invoiced, what was received, what is outstanding, what was waived, and what the AI cost. Received less AI cost is the figure a provider actually wants, and the label on it is the thing worth defending.
It is called a contribution, not a profit. It ignores the provider’s own time, which in a bid-writing business is the largest cost by a wide margin. A screen that called it profit would be telling somebody they made £1,420 on a pack that took them three days, and the moment they noticed, nothing else on the screen would be believed either.
The AI figure is not recomputed. It is the charge already settled on each execution record — the same number the wallet moved — read back through the attribution the engine set when the run happened. Recomputing it from tokens and a multiplier would produce a second figure that disagrees with the wallet the day somebody changes the multiplier, and then there are two answers to “what did this customer cost us” and no way to tell which is right.
That attribution is the quiet feature underneath it. Every agent run carries the customer, the engagement and the bid it was spent on. Without it a provider has one number for the month and no idea which customer earned it; with it, margin per customer is a read rather than a spreadsheet exercise.
The honesty that has to hold on every one of these screens: nothing here moves money. There is no payment gateway and no invoicing run. An invoice is a record of what is owed. Recording a payment is somebody saying it arrived. A statement that looked reconciled while nothing had been reconciled is the kind of wrong about money that stops a provider trusting the tool, so the sentence is on the statement and on the register rather than tucked into a release note.
The invoice register says the same thing in a different way: it shows what is past due rather than quietly ageing it, because a deposit nobody chased and a deposit somebody decided to waive look identical on a screen that does not distinguish them.
See the record being made rather than described.
Launch the demo environment