Margin contribution index

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What it is

margin_contribution_index is how well margin is holding up across your business, expressed on a single 0-100 scale. Higher is better. It reads contribution margin against the margin envelope your growth posture sets — so it is not an absolute verdict on your margin, it is a verdict on your margin given what you are currently trying to do. A business deliberately buying growth and a business consolidating are not held to the same line, and the index is what makes their positions comparable on one scale. It is bounded at 0 and 100 and cannot leave that range.

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How it is calculated

Measured. It is not a weighted blend of signals, and this is the thing most easily misread about it. Beacon’s other 0-100 values — health score, fit score, customer value — score several dimensions and combine them at fixed weights that sum to one. This one does something different: it reconciles four views of margin into a single position for each entity, then rolls those positions up. There is no table of dimension weights to show you, because there are no dimensions being blended. What is weighted is the rollup. Each entity enters the total in proportion to its share of your trailing twelve months of revenue, and those shares sum to one by construction. A segment carrying a fifth of your revenue carries a fifth of the weight — not a weight anyone set. The consolidation behind it runs in four stages — entity resolution, translation to a common basis, cross-checking at three intersections, and the weighted rollup. Those stages are set out in full under contribution margin, and this index is the scaled reading of their result. It is measured, not modelled. No part of Beacon that reasons is involved in producing it, and it does not adjust its own weights. The weighting basis and the thresholds are recalibrated quarterly by people and never between locks. The same inputs return the same number.

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Where it comes from

The same four sources as contribution margin — lifecycle economics by segment, contract margin by deal, acquisition economics by channel, and cost to serve by customer — plus the margin envelope of your active growth posture, which is what the result is read against. An entity held out of the locked view for an unresolved reconciliation difference or low-confidence source data is out of this index too. It reads the reconciled position, not the raw one. The index carries no money, and that no longer opens a door to it. It is a score, but the opt-in is not keyed to money — it follows how sensitive the record behind the value is, and what this index reports is margin. Every door takes an opt-in, as it does for contribution margin. Where the choice is made. This value is not open by default on any door. The choice happens when a reader grant that reaches it is issued or widened, when you subscribe to events, or when you turn the CRM property on. Whoever makes it is shown who becomes able to see the value, and their yes is recorded — holding a grant is no longer enough on its own. It also sits at a higher audience ceiling than the revenue figures on the same object, because what it reports is margin. That governs where the value may travel and which grant may cover it — not who inside your company may look at a number your company owns.

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How fresh it is

Worked out monthly, on the fifth business day, with the margin consolidation it reads. The month-end view is fixed at that point and re-opened at the next monthly cycle; the quarter-end view is final and does not re-open. A change in your growth posture re-runs it, because the envelope it is read against has moved.

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Currency and rounding

Neither applies. The index is dimensionless — money feeds it, in your single reporting currency, but the value that comes out has no unit and carries no currency of its own. Beacon applies no rounding to bring a value over a band boundary.

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What changes it

Margin moving, at any of its four sources. Mix moving — the same margin arranged differently across segments and channels rolls up to a different index, because the rollup is revenue-share weighted. Your growth posture changing, which moves the envelope without anything about your margin changing at all. An index that falls the week after a posture change is usually reporting the new standard, not a new problem. A quarterly recalibration of the weighting basis or the thresholds, which is a decision people take.

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What it is not

• Not a margin percentage. It is an index on a 0-100 scale; an index of 63 does not mean 63% margin, and the two are not convertible.
• Not contribution_margin. That is the amount; this is how the amount reads against what you are aiming at.
• Not margin_contribution_band. The band is which of four ranges this index falls in, published beside it as a separate value.
• Not comparable between companies, and not comparable across your own posture changes without knowing one happened.
• Not a modelled score. Nothing here reasons, and nothing retunes itself.
• Not a forecast of margin.