You Cannot Protect Profit You Cannot See

Most contractors talk about profit only in the past tense — after a job closes out.
By then, it is too late to correct anything.

BreakEven PLUS with FALIB reporting treats profit as a designed input, not a forensic discovery. We model, expose, and separate every profit component so you know exactly where profit exists, on what basis, and at what risk — before you price the work.

We do not show “a profit line” — we show every profit vector

Inside the BreakEven / FALIB model you see profit four different ways:

1. Labor Profit Markup (Fee %)
   – the intentional markup applied to labor cost

2. Labor Profit Margin (Fee % of revenue)
   – the true retained margin after markup enters the revenue side

3. Labor Profit Dollar Amount
   – the actual dollar gain on labor alone (not blended with materials or subs)

4. Profit Per Hour
   – the hourly equivalent of the labor fee so estimators and PMs see what profit they are actually putting at risk when they burn hours

None of those numbers are “rolled together.”
We show them separately so you know profit engineered vs. profit at risk.

We do the same for pass-through profit — but we do not hide it

Pass-through items (COGS, travel, equipment, subcontractors) are often where profit leaks because they are treated as “cost only.”
We expose them the same way we do labor:

• COGS markup (and its contribution to total profit)

• Subcontractor markup (and its contribution to total profit)

• Equipment / other direct costs as pass-through with markup or zero-markup policy

Then FALIB does the part spreadsheets almost never do correctly:

It calculates a blended pass-through markup — the combined profit result from COGS + Subs + other pass-through categories, expressed as both a percentage and a dollar result.

That blended number matters because owners and auditors react to totals — not components.

Then we combine profit across labor + pass-throughs — in three expressions

BreakEven PLUS generates:

1. Combined Profit Markup (%)

2. Combined Profit Margin (%)

3. Combined Profit Dollar Amount (lump sum)

This gives executives the only three questions that matter:

How much are we marking up?
How much are we actually keeping?
How many dollars does that represent?

Final Net Margin after unallowables (GovCon-only disclosure)

For GovCon contractors, profit shown on a cost model is not the same as profit you are allowed to claim.

Unallowables erase margin.

That is why FALIB provides a final net margin AFTER unallowables — not as a compliance gimmick, but as a forecasting necessity:

• Public-work Davis-Bacon contractors use the profit and markup view for pricing and cost control.

• GovCon contractors use the final-after-unallowables view to forecast what they will actually retain once FAR/CAS filters are applied.

No spreadsheet does this cleanly because spreadsheets don’t enforce accounting logic.

BreakEven PLUS does.

Profit is not a mystery number — it is an engineered decision

If you know:

• Profit per labor dollar

• Profit per hour

• Profit from pass-through

• Total combined profit

• And — for GovCon — final net margin after unallowables

…you bid from intention, not risk.

If you do not know those five things, you are not pricing profit —
you are hoping for it.