Should leadership buy the $1,500 Tariff Margin Analysis Screen?
Use this memo when finance, operations, trade compliance, or a broker partner needs a quick business case
before sending a non-confidential fit request.
The screen is meant to answer whether a bigger specialist conversation is worth the time, not to replace that specialist.
Buy when
The company has enough duty cost and record ownership to make a first read useful.
Annual duty or tariff spend is likely material to margin.
Finance can identify where duty cost lands in COGS, landed cost, or product margin.
Operations can name likely source systems for import, shipment, export, replacement, rejection, or destruction records.
Leadership wants a stop/go packet before paying for deeper claim-facing work.
Do not buy yet
The right answer may be internal cleanup before any paid review.
Annual duty spend is immaterial or unknown and no one can estimate it.
No one can identify the broker, ERP, shipment, invoice, SKU, or export record owner.
The company wants a refund guarantee, legal opinion, HTS classification, or claim filing.
The buyer is unwilling to use licensed professionals for claim-facing work.
Approval path
The internal buyer is usually finance plus the record owner.
The best sponsor is a CFO, controller, finance operator, trade-compliance owner, or operations leader who
can connect margin impact to the people who control the records.
The screen caps the first spend and prevents premature claim work.
Fixed $1,500 fee after fit and scope confirmation.
No source records through public forms or ordinary email.
Explicit boundaries around legal, brokerage, classification, filing, and refund claims.
Stop conditions are valid outcomes, not sales failures.
Expected answer
The deliverable should help leadership decide the next move.
Proceed to licensed specialist review.
Fix record ownership, match keys, or source gaps first.
Stop because materiality or traceability does not justify more spend.
Prepare better questions for a broker, drawback specialist, attorney, CPA, or trade professional.
One-sentence business case.
Spend a capped $1,500 to find out whether tariff cost in COGS has enough materiality and record traceability
to justify a more expensive licensed specialist review.
