A good customer, or a busy one?
Ask the sales director which customers matter most and you will get a list of the biggest bills. Ask the support team and you will get a different list: the ones who ring every day. Ask finance and you will hear about the ones who dispute every invoice. Nobody can say which customers make money after everything is counted, because nobody has put the numbers side by side.
The biggest account might be on a tariff agreed years ago, before supplier costs went up twice. A mid-sized customer might be quietly generating call traffic that costs more than it is billed at. A small, quiet customer might be your best margin in the business.
Renewal and pricing decisions get made on feel. Sometimes the feel is right.
When a big customer asks for a discount at renewal, the conversation happens without knowing whether the account can afford one. When a competitor offers to take a difficult customer off your hands, you have no way of telling whether you should thank them.
Why margin per customer is so hard to see
- Revenue per customer is in the billing platform, but supplier cost per customer is spread across several wholesale invoices that list services by reference, not by customer.
- Call traffic margin depends on destination and tariff, and needs call-level data to work out.
- Support time and engineer visits are logged in the helpdesk, if at all.
- Credits, goodwill gestures and absorbed charges (like aborted visits) are not linked back to the account.
- Handset subsidies and commissions paid to partners sit in finance, not in any customer view.
What not knowing costs
| Blind spot | What happens |
|---|---|
| Old tariffs below current cost | Loss-making accounts renewed on the same terms |
| High support load not priced in | Busy accounts subsidised by quiet ones |
| Partner commission not counted | Channel deals look better than they are |
| Credits not tracked per customer | Repeat goodwill nobody notices |
| Best-margin customers not identified | Your most valuable accounts get least attention |
None of this shows up in the total margin for the business, which may look fine. It shows up only when you split it by customer, and that split is exactly what the current systems cannot do without a week of spreadsheet work that nobody has time for.
The account profitability report we build
- Revenue per customer is read from your billing platform, split by product family.
- Supplier invoice lines are matched to customer services using the supplier reference, so each customer carries its own supplier cost. Unmatched lines are listed for review.
- Call traffic is costed and priced call by call, using your call data files and tariffs, so traffic margin is exact rather than estimated.
- Support tickets and engineer time are counted per customer from your helpdesk, with a cost per hour you set.
- Credits, absorbed charges, handset subsidies and partner commissions are allocated to the account they relate to.
- A monthly report ranks customers by margin, shows the trend over time, and highlights accounts heading into renewal with thin or negative margin.
The report is built in whatever your team already uses for reporting, such as Power BI or a Google Sheets dashboard, or as a simple web page.
What you can do with it
Renewals get a margin figure next to them, so account managers know when a price change is needed and when there is room to offer a discount. Directors can see which products, partners and customer types actually make money. Support can see which accounts take the most time and whether that is being paid for.
It also changes internal conversations. 'This customer is difficult' becomes 'this customer takes a lot of support time and is on a tariff that no longer covers it', which is something you can act on.
A worked example makes the point. A customer with fifty hosted seats, two broadband circuits and a busy international sales team looks healthy on revenue. Once the report adds the supplier cost of each seat, the traffic to destinations whose carrier rates rose last year, two absorbed aborted visits and the partner commission on the original deal, the account is barely breaking even. That is useful to know three months before renewal, not three months after.
Is this your situation?
- You cannot say which customers are profitable.
- Supplier invoices are not matched to customers.
- Old tariffs have never been checked against current costs.
- Support time is not counted per customer.
- Renewals are priced without a margin figure.