Rate Engine

The rate engine is the mechanism that connects direct cost estimates to fully burdened project costs. Every organization applies indirect costs differently — fringe rates on direct labor, overhead pools that vary by division or contract, G&A rates that apply at different levels of the cost structure, fee on various cost bases. The rate engine handles all of those structures without requiring the plan to be restructured when rates change.

Pool and Stack Architecture

Indirect cost pools are independent, named records. Each pool carries rates that can vary by accounting period, resource category, or organizational element — covering both the time-varying rates common in government contracting and the fixed allocation rates used in commercial environments. Pools are assembled into rate stacks, which define the ordered application of indirect costs to a given cost base. The system supports any number of pools and any number of stacks, so organizations with complex multi-tier indirect structures can model them accurately.

Automatic Propagation

When a pool rate changes — because a forward pricing rate agreement was updated, because an indirect cost proposal was revised, or because a new fiscal year rate came into effect — every assignment and non-labor event that references that pool automatically reflects the change. The time-phased cost plan does not need to be recalculated manually, and there is no risk of individual assignments being missed in a manual update pass.

Result Units

The output of rate stack expansion is a complete per-cost-element breakdown through named Result Units. A Result Unit is a named cost element — direct labor, fringe, overhead, G&A, total burdened cost — that the organization has defined. Planners can inspect any individual cost component at any level of the plan without custom aggregation work, making the cost structure transparent to both the planner and any reviewer.