MarginWatch connects read-only to what you already run — your store, your ordering system, your shared inboxes — and listens. No new software for your team. No screen monitoring. No passwords handed over.
A drawing of your back office computed from its own records: where the hours go, how long each process really takes, and what your exceptions cost.
The repetitive work comes off your people. Standard fixes are parts we already stock, so they are installed during the visit, not proposed at the end of it.
Northwind Supply Co. does not exist. Its vendors, catalogue, purchase orders, receipts and payroll are generated from a fixed seed. Everything around them is real: the same pipeline, the same three gates, the same portal a client gets.
Every figure opens the rows behind it. The value model prints its assumptions, each finding links a CSV of every case, and the hindsight tab grades the tools against what happened next.
You will also see what it did not find, and the flags it would have got wrong. Those are on the page on purpose.
620 purchase orders · 13,359 lines · 31.2 months
generated data, real pipeline
Not interviews. Not timesheets. Not a consultant's guess. Every figure traces to a count you can verify and an assumption you can dispute.
Which is why anything on your list with a payback under six months is installed during the engagement. Nothing is invented on your time, and nothing sends itself.
Sales velocity and stock levels draft the purchase order. The keying goes; the decision does not.
Every PO already carries a due date and a delivered date. Late ones get chased on a schedule instead of when someone remembers.
Every short-received line already carries ordered against received. A drafted credit request turns a judgment call into an approval.
Drafts that sat past your own normal cycle surface as a queue, rather than ageing quietly inside the ordering system.
Also on the shelf, priced once their source lands: carrier invoice audit, settlement reconciliation, wholesale dunning. Every part drafts and a person approves — that is the design, not a setting you can switch off.
Every diagnosis ships with this. We run the tools at a past date, against only what was knowable then, and grade them on what actually happened after — so you see the hit rate on your own records before you buy anything. No pilot period required. The figures below are from a working retailer, purchasing system only.
It measures systems, not people. These are enforced in the code, not promised in a policy.
One exception, named here because a list of nevers should not bury it: task titles and comment text from your project tool are read, in order to classify what kind of work each one is. They are kept only if you ask for them, stay out of the analysis logs entirely, and are shown only on your own portal. That retention exists because a client asked for it, and it is off unless you do.
Twenty to forty minutes, once. Each source is a grant, an export or a webhook. Never an install.
Before you touch anything. The machine is ready and empty, pointed at nothing.
Order system, store, shared mailbox, project tool. Paste a read-only key, add a webhook, or drop a CSV. Skip anything you would rather not share.
Thirty days, read-only. The blueprint builds as the record fills.
Anything with a payback under six months goes in during the visit, and you keep it running afterwards.
The inspection is the only thing you commit to. Everything after it is scoped by your own report, in the order your own report ranked it.
The read-only connection, the blueprint, the ranked automation list with a monthly dollar figure on every line, and the hindsight grade sheet.
Credited in full against anything you install, so if you act on the report the inspection costs nothing. And if the report cannot name its own price in monthly automatable work, we say so and you do not pay.
Three months of the value that part protects each month. So the payback is three months, on every part, and it is arithmetic you can check rather than a number we picked.
A part whose value cannot carry the smallest sensible fee is included, not sold — on the demo that hands you supplier chasing and shortage credits for nothing, because $5/mo and $59/mo cannot honestly carry a price. Your diagnosis fee comes off the first one you do buy.
Always-on re-measurement and drift alerts. Offered only after an implementation, so there is a measured baseline for it to move against.
Why it is not a checkup: a late purchase order lives about five days between going late and arriving. Anything that looks once a month structurally cannot see it. Some leaks are only catchable by something that never stops watching.
Invoice errors, short shipments, damage claims, carrier overcharges, settlement gaps. The AP-recovery industry standard rate.
Priced on what actually lands, which is why these lines stay unpriced in your report until their source is connected. An honest blank is better than a number we cannot stand behind.
You keep the blueprint either way. If you install nothing, the diagnosis is still yours: the function map, the cycle times, the exception costs and the ranked list, with every figure traceable to a count you can check.
Book a visitFour fields. We reply with whether your systems can be read at all, and what the first pass would likely find, before anyone asks you for money.
Read-only, revocable, and nothing installs on anyone's computer. If you would rather just write to a person, email instead.