--- title: "Cost forecasting, not cost tracking · DeliverySheet" description: "Finance needs a number before the work starts. That is a forecasting problem, and solving it with time tracking answers a different question badly." canonical_url: "https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/cost-forecasting-not-cost-tracking" last_updated: 2026-08-21 meta: author: "Tan Gravam" "og:description": "Finance needs a number before the work starts. That is a forecasting problem, and solving it with time tracking answers a different question badly." "og:image": "https://www.deliverysheet.com/_og/s/o_41f14bd1ec111719.png" "og:image:alt": "Forecast what work will cost. Do not track what it did. — DeliverySheet essay card" "og:image:height": "600" "og:image:type": image/png "og:image:width": "1200" "og:title": "Forecast what work will cost. Do not track what it did. — DeliverySheet" "twitter:description": "Finance needs a number before the work starts. That is a forecasting problem, and solving it with time tracking answers a different question badly." "twitter:image": "https://www.deliverysheet.com/_og/s/o_41f14bd1ec111719.png" "twitter:image:alt": "Forecast what work will cost. Do not track what it did. — DeliverySheet essay card" "twitter:title": "Forecast what work will cost. Do not track what it did. — DeliverySheet" --- > Index of every page on this site: [llms.txt](https://www.deliverysheet.com/llms.txt) [← All writing](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog) # **Forecast what work will cost. Do not track what it did.** 6 August 2026 · 4 min read · by [Tan Gravam](https://www.deliverysheet.com/about) ## **How should you forecast the cost of engineering work?** **The short answer ** Forecast delivery cost as FTE-months multiplied by an estimated monthly cost per person, and stop there. That answers the question finance actually asks — what will this cost — before the money is committed, which is when the answer can still change a decision. Tracking actual consumption answers what it cost afterwards, requires time logging to be accurate, and produces a number nobody can act on. Keep cost estimates visible to whoever decides budgets and invisible to the person they describe. Finance asks what the new platform work will cost. Engineering answers in FTE-months. Finance asks what that is in euros. Somebody opens a spreadsheet, and three months later there is a time-tracking initiative. The initiative solves a different problem from the one that was asked, which is why it never satisfies anyone. ## Two questions that sound alike **What will this cost?** Asked before the money is committed. The answer changes a decision — whether to do it, whether to do it now, whether to do the smaller version. **What did this cost?** Asked after. The answer changes nothing about the thing it measures, and it requires every person to log their hours accurately for months. Almost every organisation that sets out to answer the first ends up building machinery for the second, because the second is measurable and the first is an estimate. Measurable beats useful in most procurement conversations. ## The forecast is one multiplication Take the capacity figure the delivering team gave — say four FTE-months. Multiply by an estimated monthly cost per person for that craft. That is the forecast. It is approximate, and its approximation is the point: it is accurate enough to compare two options and to tell whether something is a €40k decision or a €400k one, which is the resolution the actual decision needs. This is the whole reason to size work in [FTE-months rather than story points](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/fte-months-capacity-unit) . Points cannot be multiplied by anything. The conversion has to happen somewhere, and if the unit cannot do it, it happens informally in somebody's head — usually badly, and always without a record. ## Why actual-cost tracking corrodes what it measures Three failures, in increasing order of how much damage they do. **It needs accuracy it cannot get.** Hours logged at the end of a week are reconstructions. Everyone knows this and the number gets used anyway. **It arrives too late to matter.** By the time you know what something cost, you have spent it. Feedback that arrives after the only decision point is a report, not an instrument. **It changes behaviour in the wrong direction.** The moment hours are attributed to projects, the attribution becomes political — time gets logged where it looks defensible, not where it went. So the data degrades exactly as it becomes important, which is the same mechanism that ruins [every other consumption metric](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/allocation-not-consumption) . ## The one legitimate use, and how to serve it Cross-charging is real. A shared platform team's cost genuinely has to be allocated across the business units it serves, and somebody has to produce the numbers. But that needs *allocation* data, not consumption data: which demands consumed committed capacity from which teams, in which quarter, attributed to which cost centre. All of which is knowable from the commitments, forecast at planning time, and none of which requires anyone to log an hour. The useful boundary: a delivery system should **enable** cross-charging by surfacing the allocation, and should not **execute** it. Finance has systems for that, and they are better than anything a delivery tool will build. ## Who gets to see it Per-person cost estimates are the most sensitive data in a delivery system, and the rule that keeps them usable is narrow: visible to whoever decides budgets, invisible to the person they describe. This is not squeamishness. An estimated monthly cost is a planning figure, not a salary — it is rounded, role-based and often wrong at the individual level. Shown to the person it names, it reads as a statement about their worth, which it is not and cannot survive being mistaken for. ## How DeliverySheet draws the line Cost, when it is drawn here, is forecasting only — the allocation side, never consumption. There is no time tracking, no actual-cost consumption, no payroll integration, and those are on a written list of things the product will never do — not a backlog. To be exact about today: no cost figure is recorded or shown anywhere in the product. A commitment carries its effort in FTE-months per team, and that is the whole of it. The forecast this essay argues for — an estimated cost × committed FTE-months — is the intended shape and is *not built*; until it is, the multiplication is yours to do outside the product, from the committed FTE-months it does hold. This essay describes the principle the product is built to hold to, not a screen you will find on signing in. One rule is already decided for the day a cost figure exists: it will be *absent from the response entirely* for anyone who should not see it, rather than sent and hidden. A field hidden client-side is a field that has already been sent. I'm Tan Gravam. I build **DeliverySheet** — it takes a vague work request to a clear delivery decision, so the shape, owner, capacity, dependencies and open questions are on the table before anyone commits people or a date. $189/month per workspace, unlimited members. 7-day free trial — card required, cancel before it ends and you're not charged. I answer the support email myself. [**Start 7-day trial **](https://www.deliverysheet.com/login?next=/app) [**See pricing **](https://www.deliverysheet.com/pricing) Not ready for that? Play [eight rounds of Request or topic?](https://www.deliverysheet.com/spot-the-request) It takes two minutes and needs no sign-up. ## **More on capacity and what to measure** [Read the overview: Capacity and what to measure →](https://www.deliverysheet.com/topics/capacity) - [A capacity planning template that fits on one sheet](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/capacity-planning-template) The five columns a capacity plan actually needs, per team — and the two failures no spreadsheet template can fix, whatever you add to it. - [Estimating capacity when you don't know enough yet](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/estimating-capacity-you-dont-have-yet) The honest answers to "how big is this?" are a range, a range with low confidence, and "I need to look first". - [How to justify engineering headcount: show what was turned away](https://www.deliverysheet.com/blog/justifying-engineering-headcount) A headcount case rests on four numbers: the team's honest capacity, what it committed and delivered, what was declined for capacity, and what that cost. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@id":"https://www.deliverysheet.com/#website","@type":"WebSite","description":"Turn raw work requests into structured, decision-ready demands before you commit people, budget, or a date. 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That answers the question finance actually asks — what will this cost — before the money is committed, which is when the answer can still change a decision. Tracking actual consumption answers what it cost afterwards, requires time logging to be accurate, and produces a number nobody can act on. 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