Your revenue is visible. Your margin leakage is not.

In a mid-market group, reported margin is an opinion. The cash-true margin — by customer, product, channel and payment behaviour — is already inside the ERP, and it rarely matches the management pack.

• The four axes we recompute together (customer, product, channel, payment behaviour) are almost always present as raw fields; what is missing is the join that treats a late-paying customer as a discount, not a receivable. Once the join is applied, the top-decile customer table reorders.
• Discount registers, rebate accruals and shipping allocations sit in different systems and rarely reconcile to the P&L presented to the board. Recomputing them against the cash ledger, rather than against the sales system, is where the leakage first becomes visible.
• Payment behaviour is the axis most often missing entirely. Treating days-sales-outstanding as a customer-level margin adjustment, not a treasury metric, changes both the pricing decision and the credit decision — and both are usually made by different people from different reports.