Why we stopped fixed prices for Scope 3

You cannot price what nobody has opened

We used to quote a fixed fee for a Scope 3 inventory. It worked about half the time. The other half, the data turned out to be in a different condition than anyone had described, and the fixed price then forced one of two bad outcomes: a loss, or a narrower piece of work quietly delivered against the original scope.

The honest version is that the size of the job is unknown until the purchase ledger is open, because the thing being priced is not the counting. It is the condition of the records underneath the counting.

What actually moves the number

None of it is visible from a scoping call, which is why the scoping call cannot produce a reliable figure. Every one of these is a question about records nobody in the room has opened yet, and the honest answer at that stage is a range wide enough to be useless as a quote.

• How many suppliers sit in tier one, and whether anyone has ever surveyed them
• Whether the purchase ledger distinguishes categories or lumps them under one code
• Whether a prior year exists on a comparable boundary, or has to be rebuilt
• How much of the total is category one, which is where the weeks go

What we do instead

A short, fixed-price first stage: open the ledger, sample it, and report what shape it is in. That produces a scope and a price for the real work, and it is cheap enough that a client who then walks away has still bought something useful — namely, an honest account of their own data.

The expensive year is the first one. What it is really buying is a survey that exists and a tier one that has answered once.

Clients prefer the certainty, at first

Everyone would rather have one number up front, and we understood the appeal of selling one. The clients who have been through a fixed-price inventory that went sideways, and watched the scope narrow quietly to fit the fee, rarely ask for it twice.