Why we build MarginChief
Importers know what they paid the supplier. Far fewer know what the product actually cost them.
Freight, duty, brokerage, insurance and handling arrive on separate bills, from separate vendors, often weeks apart and sometimes after the stock has already been sold. Those charges routinely account for a large share of unit cost. Until they are allocated back to individual SKUs, every price, every margin report and every inventory valuation rests on the supplier invoice figure alone, which is not the cost of anything.
Most importers solve this the same way: a spreadsheet, rebuilt every shipment, by hand. It takes hours it should not take, it breaks when the person who built it leaves, and it produces a number nobody can trace back to a document six months later.
MarginChief exists to close that gap. Not to estimate the cost, and not to replace the accounting system, but to turn the bills that already exist into a unit cost that holds up.
Who builds it
MarginChief is a product of CloudRev Intelligence, a fintech development company with offices in London (UK) and Jakarta.
We build automation that takes the repetitive, high-stakes work out of finance and supply chain operations, so the people doing that work can spend their time on the parts that need judgment.
CloudRev's core work is document processing for finance: extracting, classifying and summarising data from invoices, purchase orders, bank statements, forms and contracts, across both digital and scanned files. That is the foundation MarginChief is built on. The hard part of landed cost was never the arithmetic. It was reading a freight invoice reliably enough to trust the arithmetic that follows.
What we believe about costing
Automation should not act alone. An extraction engine reads a freight bill faster and more consistently than a person can. It should not be the last thing that touches a number before it reaches your ledger.
A cost you cannot trace is not a cost. It is an assertion. Every component of every unit cost in MarginChief links back to the document and the line it came from, because "that's what the spreadsheet said" is not an answer to an auditor.
The allocation basis is a decision, not a default. Spreading a freight bill by weight rather than by value can reverse which of your products looks most profitable. That choice belongs to you, made deliberately and applied consistently, rather than inherited from a formula somebody wrote two years ago.
MarginChief does one job. It is not an ERP, not an inventory system and not an accounting platform. It produces the number those systems need and gets out of the way.