Prices moved and nobody captured it

Escalation rarely announces itself; it drips. Each order costs a little more than the last, each haulage invoice creeps, and because no single jump justifies a conversation, months pass with the drift landing silently on margin. By the time someone compares today's rates with tender's, the gap is real money - unrecorded, unnotified, and absent from every forecast the business has been reading.

Capture has two halves. Commercially: whether the contract gives any route to recover it - a fluctuations provision, changed work priced at current cost - and where a route exists, the position built and notified while invoices can still be matched to the movement. Internally, and regardless: the cost to complete carried at real current rates, so the outturn stops assuming last year's prices. Recoverable or not, the movement has to be in the number.