The industry already has a name for this.
We refuse it.
You fought for the markup and won the work at a margin you could live with. Then somewhere between the handshake and the bank, points went missing.
Not stolen. Leaked. Time approved against the wrong order. Pay run against the wrong rule. An amendment sitting in an inbox while the invoice bills the old terms. Cash landing on the wrong invoice.
Every firm can describe the symptoms. None had a name for the disease, so it got filed under the cost of doing business.
It is not a cost. It is leak, and it is measurable: Margin leakage.
The margin leak is bigger than the profit.
Preventable billing errors run up to 5% of billable revenue. Staffing nets about 3%. And the two traditional ways out are closed: revenue fell three years running, so you cannot grow out of it, and rate compression means you cannot price your way out either. What is left is the margin you already won and never collected.
WHY IT SURVIVED
Checking everything was impossible, so nobody checked everything.
Hercules ingests your contracts and extracts the rules automatically. No more spreadsheets buried in someone's head.
"Twenty-six years in the industry, and I never tried to solve it, because there was no solution out there."
There was simply nothing better. Now there is.
We believe every dollar of negotiated margin should survive to the P&L. We believe margin deserves its own metric - the Margin Leakage Rate, the share of contracted gross profit that never arrives - and that every firm should be able to answer one question:
Request your assessment and see where margin is leaking
We'll bring a specific number built from your data, your contract complexity, and your error patterns. You'll see exactly where the leakage is, how much it's worth, and what fixing it takes. Walk away with a full report.