How It Works

The Model

Recipes become costs. Costs become margins. Margins become decisions.

Intensifly builds a living cost model from your products, suppliers, and overheads. Every number you see — margins, coverage, Earning Power, Owner Capacity, Trust — traces back to this model. Here's how it works under the hood.

The model in 30 seconds
1Prices × quantities → Revenue
2Recipes × quantities → Variable cost (COGS)
3Rent, salaries, loan interest → Overheads
4Revenue − Variable − Overheads = Profit
5Do planned purchases cover planned output? → Coverage
6When reality drifts → Issues → tasks → approval
Foundation

One equation drives everything

Revenue minus variable costs minus overheads equals profit. Every business follows this — the difference is how precisely you know each part.

Variable costs come from recipes: what goes into each product or service you sell, priced by your actual suppliers. Overheads are everything else — rent, salaries, utilities, loan interest — entered as flat monthly amounts. The model computes each side differently, but they feed the same equation.

Monthly Profit Model
Revenue
Price × quantity across all products
12,420From sales plan
Variable costs
COGS: per-unit cost of materials, supplies, labor
−4,180From recipes
Overheads
Rent, salaries, utilities, loan interest
−2,220Flat amounts
=
Operating Profit
What the business actually earned
6,020
📦
Product A
Revenue · Product group 1
14.50
Sell price
Recipe / Bill of Materials
Material 1per unit2.40
Material 2per unit1.15
Consumablesper unit0.60
Labortime1.85
Unit cost
6.0059% margin
Recipes

Every product has a recipe

A recipe — also called a bill of materials — defines what goes into producing one unit: materials with quantities, consumables with counts, labor measured in time. Each component links to a supplier and a price. The unit cost rolls up automatically.

Sell price minus unit cost gives you the margin — per product, with real numbers. Recipes can nest. A sub-assembly is itself a recipe with its own inputs. The model expands the full tree to compute the true total cost.

Shadow expenses

Why COGS doesn't show up in your bank

You pay a supplier for a bulk order. That's a cash event — money leaves your account. But the cost doesn't hit your profit until you sell products that consume those materials.

💳
Cash event
−5,000
Bulk purchase to supplier.
Hits your bank account today.
📐
Shadow expense
Recipe × Qty
Spread across products sold
via recipes and quantities.
📊
Coverage check
87%
Can scheduled purchases
support your sales plan?
Coverage

Same recipe, opposite question

The recipe tells you what a product needs. Run it forward, and you get cost. Run it backward, and you get capacity: given your supply plan, how many units can you fulfill?

Coverage compares scheduled purchases against projected demand for every input. The limiting factor — the one input that runs out first — determines your effective capacity. This isn't inventory management. It's a model-level feasibility check: do the plans add up?

Forward → Cost
Output → Inputs needed
"What does it cost to make this?"
To sell 100 units, you need X of Material 1 · Y of Material 2 · Z labor hours
Inverse → Capacity
Inputs scheduled → Output possible
"How many can I actually fulfill?"
With current purchases scheduled, you can fulfill ~67 units (Material 2 is limiting)
Coverage = Supported revenue ÷ Planned revenue. The lowest-coverage input sets the ceiling.
⚠️
Supplier price change: Input B
1.20/unit → 1.42/unit (+18.3%)
1Unit cost recalculates for every recipe that uses Input B — across all affected products.
2Margins update automatically. Some products absorb it easily. Others drop below target.
3Issue surfaces: "4 products affected by Input B price increase." Ranked by margin impact.
4Task proposed: "Adjust sell price on Product C to restore target margin." You review and approve.
✓ One input changed. Entire model updated. Nothing happened without your approval.
Ripple effect

One price change updates everything

A supplier raises the price on a key input. In the model, the change propagates automatically. Every recipe that uses that input recalculates. Every product margin updates. If any product drops below your threshold, it surfaces as an issue.

The cascade works for any model change: a new supplier option, a recipe adjustment, a fixed cost increase. Change the input once. See the system-wide effect immediately.

Two kinds of cost

Variable costs need recipes. Overheads don't.

Variable costs scale with production — they need quantities and recipes to compute a per-unit cost. Overheads are flat amounts that don't change with volume.

Variable costs
Scale with production
Material 1per unit
Material 2per unit
Consumablesper unit
Hourly laborper unit (time)
✓ Has recipe✓ Coverage✓ Per-unit cost
Overheads
Flat amounts, no recipe
Rentmonthly
Salariesmonthly
Utilitiesmonthly
Insurancemonthly
Loan interestmonthly
No recipeNo coverage✓ Affects profit
Labor

Time is just another ingredient

Labor works like any other recipe component — except it's measured in time, not weight or volume. A product takes a certain amount of staff time to produce. At an hourly rate, that becomes a per-unit cost.

Hourly labor scales with production. A salaried employee is a fixed cost — same monthly amount regardless of volume. The model puts each in the right bucket automatically. No timesheets required.

Recipe: Product A — all components
Material 1per unit2.40
Material 2per unit1.15
Consumablesper unit0.60
Staff labor8 min @ 14/hr1.85
Unit cost6.00

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