Margin often moves before Finance sees it
A deal can look healthy in the approval model and still lose margin later. The usual causes are familiar: more specialist effort than planned, scope ambiguity, an aggressive implementation date, service credits, unpriced custom work, or customer dependencies that were assumed rather than confirmed.
By the time the variance appears in delivery reporting, the customer promise has already been made. Finance is explaining the result instead of changing the decision.
The contract price is only part of the economics
Revenue is obvious. Delivery effort is less obvious. Cash timing is easy to underweight. So are onboarding cost, support intensity, transition work, governance overhead and the cost of an SLA miss.
A commercially sound decision should connect the price to what the enterprise has actually promised to do.
Delivery needs to enter the deal earlier
The delivery team should not be the first group to discover that the implementation depends on a scarce skill, an unproven integration, or a customer action that has not been secured.
A practical control brings delivery assumptions into the commitment decision while the scope, timing or price can still change.
The question for the COO and CFO
For one low-margin account, trace the first moment when the economics went wrong. Was it really during delivery? Or was the cost already embedded in the promise?
That distinction matters because the cheapest time to repair a bad commitment is before the company makes it.