Acme Retail Cost Allocation & Margin Standard — FY2026

Owner: VP Finance (jsmith@acme) Effective: 2026-02-01 Supersedes: the pre-2026 margin definition (see metrics/gross-margin-legacy.md)

COGS composition

FY2026 COGS for a completed order is the sum of:

Product cost — from products.cost at time of order (locked at order creation)
Inbound fulfillment cost — allocated per-unit from monthly warehouse aggregates
Outbound shipping cost — carrier-billed actuals from logistics.shipment_cost
Payment processing fees — Stripe fees from finance.payment_fees

The pre-2026 definition included only (1). Adding (2) — (4) reduces reported gross margin by ~4-6 percentage points but produces a number Finance can reconcile to the GL.

Gross margin formula

For a period P:

gross_margin(P) = SUM(net_amount) - SUM(cogs_full)   over orders recognized in P

Where cogs_full is the sum of the four components above.

Reporting granularity

The standard supports gross margin at three levels: portfolio, category, and SKU. Category and SKU cuts require joining orders to products on product_id.

What this policy authorizes

Any Attested Computation whose sources cites this policy MUST use all four COGS components. The legacy formula (product-cost-only) is preserved in metrics/gross-margin-legacy.md for historical query reproducibility; do not use it for new analyses.

Cited by

metrics/gross-margin — current gross-margin metric implements this standard
metrics/gross-margin-legacy — deprecated metric, superseded by the definition this standard authorizes
computations/gross-margin-period — sanctioned SQL implements the four COGS components defined here

Markdown file margin-standard.md