Built to make true profitability knowable.

CostCtrl gives operationally complex businesses the rigour of activity-based costing without the cost, the consultants, or the months it used to take.

Why CostCtrl exists.

Profitability has always been knowable. The blocker was the cost of knowing it. Building a model took months. Maintaining it took an analyst. Trusting it took a leap.

CostCtrl was founded on a single bet: that the rigour of activity-based costing was never the problem. The cost of reaching it was. Twenty-five years of practice built the methodology, the engine logic, and the judgement that turn raw data into decisions a board can act on. That's the part that makes the numbers real, and it's the part you can't shortcut. What AI changes is the friction: it strips the months, the manual rebuilds, and the consulting budget out of getting there. The methodology and the team deliver the result. AI makes it fast and affordable enough for the businesses that always needed it.

We're based in New Zealand, with a founder in Europe, so between us we cover APAC and EMEA across the working day.

We want every operationally complex business to know its true unit economics, the day after it asks the question.

Miguel Guimaraes presenting the Snell case study to a seated audience — Miguel presenting the Snell case study: the systems, the data, and the model built on them.

The methodology lead

Twenty-five years building the models.

Miguel is a management and industrial engineer who has spent twenty-five years building cost and profitability models for businesses across distribution, logistics, healthcare, manufacturing, and professional services. He has implemented on every major platform in the category, from SAS Activity-Based Management and Acorn Systems to SAP PCM, SAP PaPM, and Oracle Hyperion, and he works in the methodologies that underpin them all: traditional Activity-Based Costing and Kaplan and Anderson's Time-Driven ABC.

A quarter of a century of that work taught him a frustrating pattern. The methodology always worked. Done properly, it told a business things about itself that nothing else could. But the cost and effort of deploying it (the platforms, the consultants, the months) ruled it out for almost every company that needed it. The value was real and the access was not.

Through his consultancy, Cost and Profitability Consulting Lda, Miguel had spent years delivering that value one engagement at a time. CostCtrl is his answer to the access problem: the same rigour, without the cost of getting there. Based in Portugal and delivering projects across three continents, he anchors the methodology that the platform is built on.

The customer-side founder

Fourteen years living the problem.

Sam spent fourteen years in industrial distribution, close enough to the numbers to know that the P&L was hiding more than it showed. The turning point was watching what it took to find the answers: a cost-modelling project that changed how the business traded, but only after an investment of money and time that most businesses can't justify.

That left him with a bigger question. If the value locked inside one business was that significant, and that hard to reach, how much is lost across the whole economy every year to complexity that's too messy to untangle? Most companies never get to find out. The cost of looking is higher than the cost of guessing.

Sam met Miguel as a customer, hiring him to run that first project. What stood out was how pragmatic and easy to work with he was, a world away from the rigid, over-engineered consulting Sam had expected. CostCtrl came out of a simple conviction the two of them shared: the methodology works, and the only thing standing between most businesses and their real economics is the cost of getting there. They set out to remove it.

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