For the desk that owns the number
A sales manager stops finding out at month end.
The margin report is not wrong, it is late — by the time it runs, the customer has the price and the concession is a fact. PIE moves the check to the moment the line is priced: a breach is held for your sign-off instead of sent, and what you sign is recorded with the policy version that judged it.
The two things that actually reach you
A held line, with cost, floor and recommended price on it and the rule that stopped it named — one screen, one decision, on the record. And a short list of accounts that changed: margin drifting, a customer declining, cost that went up and was never passed through. Not a dashboard to go and interrogate every morning.
What the sales manager sees
- Cost basis, margin and the supplier side of the book
- Every held line, with the rule that held it and the figures behind it
- Margin drift per customer and per item, and the rows each figure came from
- The signals raised over your own persisted rows, each opening into its evidence
What never reaches you
- Below-cost approvals, where your organization has set them to require the owner's own signature. That is a policy setting rather than a fixed rule, and where it is off a manager decides those too.
- The owner-only surfaces: margin policy, users and roles, AI keys, connections and the trust controls.
Three things, on your own numbers
Deterministic arithmetic over rows your ERP already wrote, stamped with the version of the policy that judged it. The AI reads those numbers and phrases them; it never produces one.
The check moves to the moment of quoting
Your policy sets the floor per line and PIE applies it while the salesperson is pricing, not in a report afterwards. A breach does not send quietly — the platform holds it, which means the conversation happens before the customer has a number.
A short list, not a dashboard
Ten detectors run over rows your ERP already wrote — decline, dormancy, margin deterioration, cost not passed through, and six at the customer-and-item grain. Each is written up in plain words and opens into the figures that raised it.
Numbers that still explain themselves
Every computed row is stamped with a hash of the policy that judged it, so editing the margin policy does not make last quarter's decisions unreadable. Approvals and signals are append-only: what you signed keeps the thresholds that were in force.
The limits, before you find them in week three
Each of these is a thing the product does not do for sales managers today. They are on the page because the alternative is you finding them after a pilot.
- Quotes are not imported from any ERP, so a win rate has no denominator until your desk starts quoting inside PIE. Everything about quoted-and-lost is invisible before that.
- Special pricing agreements and manufacturer rebates are not modelled. Margin is computed from the cost on the AP-invoice line, so on a book where a large share of purchases is claimed back afterwards the floor sits above the one you actually have.
- There is no forecast and no target-tracking. PIE reports what the rows say and what the policy did; it does not project.
- There is no activity log, so nothing here tells you who called whom.
Why it can be trusted
The AI never computes a single number.
Your business data and your rules determine the number. AI explains it.
Same inputs, same answer, every time — with a paper trail.
- Deterministic calculations — every figure is arithmetic on your own records; turn AI off and every number still works
- Auditable decisions — each number names the policy that produced it, so a price you quoted last quarter still explains itself
- Your data — read from your own books, used for you alone, exportable and erasable on request; AI runs on your own account
- Your rules — you set the floors and thresholds, and PIE holds every quote to them
- Provenance — every row carries the connector, the connection and the id it came from, so nothing in PIE claims a source it did not have
What sales managers ask first
What stops a salesperson simply overriding the floor?
They cannot. The line is held by the platform rather than flagged to the person pricing it, and it routes to somebody with the authority to sign — a manager, or the owner where the line is below cost and your policy requires it. The salesperson is not asked to decide and is not told which cost-based rule fired.
Can I edit the margin policy?
The policy is owner-editable. You approve against it. That split is deliberate — the person who signs an exception is not the person who moves the line the exception is measured from.
What happens to old numbers when the policy changes?
Anything a human signed keeps the version that was in force when they signed it — approvals, signals and quote snapshots are append-only. Derived metrics are upserted and carry the stamp of the policy that judged the value they currently hold; a full re-sync rebuilds them from your ERP.
Does the AI decide what to escalate?
No. The detectors are deterministic arithmetic over persisted rows against thresholds you set. A model may phrase a finding in plain words; it never produces a number and it never decides one is worth raising. Turn it off and the same list appears.
Three people, three screens, one set of numbers
The same rows, projected differently and enforced in one place. Reading the other two is the fastest way to see where the line actually falls.
PIE for salespeople
Paste an enquiry as it arrived and get priced lines. You see the floor, the recommended price and this customer's own history — cost and margin are absent from the response, not hidden in the browser. The guardrail travels with the quote instead of living in a manager's head.
PIE for owners and finance
You set the floors and the thresholds; the platform holds every quote to them and records who signed what against which version. Read-only against your ERP, deterministic by construction, and honest about the months it could not measure.
Your books already know where the margin went.
30–45 minutes, your own numbers on the screen, and an honest answer about what PIE can and cannot see on your book.