Recorded, modelled, measured

Every figure in Navige belongs to one of three classes, and the class is always shown next to the number. This is the convention the whole product is built on, and the reason you can take a number from it into a meeting.

Recorded

Something happened and we observed it. The call was made, these were the tokens, this is what the model's published rate makes that cost.

Recorded cost is still our arithmetic over the provider's own usage numbers — it is not the provider's invoice. Where we can read the invoice, we do, and the gap between the two is itself a finding.

Modelled

A counterfactual. “Had routing been on, these 1,204 calls would have cost $412 less.” Nothing was saved. No money moved. It is an estimate of a world that did not happen, and it is the main number a Watchtower account sees.

Measured

A lever fired, and we have both sides. This call was routed to a cheaper model; here is what it cost and what the model it replaced would have cost on the same input. The difference is real, and it is the only thing that counts toward a bill.

The rules

• Never blend them. A total that adds a measured saving to a modelled one is not a number, it is a hope. You will not find one in the product, and if you do it is a bug worth reporting.
• Null is not zero. If Navige has no price for a model, the cost is unknown and says so. A page that shows $0.00 where it means “we do not know” is the most expensive kind of wrong, because it looks fine.
• Never guess a price. No interpolating from a similar model, no assuming last month's rate still holds.

Where you will see it

On the spend pages, on every tile that carries a figure, in the weekly email, and on an invoice. The label is text, never only a colour — a reader who does not know the colour code, or who has images off in their mail client, still has to be able to tell a counterfactual from a measurement.