Modifiers: contingencies and discounts

Almost nothing prices out at its base value. A contingency gets added for risk, a discount gets negotiated away, a rush fee gets tacked on at the last minute. Monument calls these modifiers: named adjustments that sit on top of an item's calculated value, whether that item is revenue or cost. You name each one, stack as many as you need, and arrange them in whatever order the deal actually happened in.

We'll take a two hundred thousand dollar fixed fee on Riverside Apartments' Concept Design stage and put it through both a contingency and a discount.

An item is a source, then whatever you adjust it with

This picks up the model from how Monument models money: an item is its calculation type first, its modifiers second. The calculation type decides where the number starts; modifiers only ever change what happens to it after that.

A modifier itself is small, just three things:

• a type, percent or a flat dollar amount,
• a value, positive to raise the total or negative to lower it,
• a name, "Contingency", "Client Discount", "Rush Fee", whatever makes the breakdown legible to someone who wasn't in the room when it was priced.

Modifiers stack, and each one acts on whatever the running total is at that point, not on the original base. That detail matters the moment you mix a percentage with a flat amount: a fifteen percent uplift calculated before a five thousand dollar fee lands differently than the same uplift calculated after it, because a percentage always multiplies the number in front of it. You can drag a modifier row up or down to change that order, and the totals recalculate the instant you drop it.

Build the stack

Start from the two hundred thousand dollar fixed fee, add a fifteen percent contingency, then a five percent discount.

1. 1

   Open the Concept Design stage's Revenue breakdown and add a Fixed Amount item named Design Fee, set to two hundred thousand dollars.

2. 2

   In the Modifiers section, click Add. Name it Contingency, set the type to percent, and enter fifteen. The running total becomes two hundred and thirty thousand dollars.

3. 3

   Add another modifier. Name it Client Discount, set the type to percent, and enter minus five. The total settles at two hundred and eighteen thousand, five hundred dollars.

   

The breakdown lists every step of that math on its own line, base two hundred thousand, a thirty thousand dollar contingency, an eleven thousand, five hundred dollar discount, down to a final two hundred and eighteen thousand, five hundred dollars, so anyone reading the fee later can see exactly how it was built, not just what it landed on. If every modifier in the stack happens to be a percentage, the editor also shows a single combined net effect. And if a negotiation changes the order things actually happened in, say a flat rush fee needs to apply before the contingency percentage rather than after, you don't rebuild the fee: drag the rows into the order you mean and the stack recalculates as you drop them.

Troubleshooting

• Reordering two modifiers changed the total. That's expected whenever you mix a percentage with a fixed amount, since a percentage always multiplies whatever total is running at that point in the stack. Order the rows the way the pricing conversation actually went.
• A modifier doesn't seem to be doing anything. A modifier left at zero is skipped entirely rather than shown as a no-op line. Give it a real value or remove it.
• A discount can't push the fee negative. The final clamp never lets the total drop below zero, so an oversized discount just floors out at zero rather than going negative. A genuine credit belongs on a different item, not a discount sized past what it can adjust.

Where this fits next

Modifiers work on any item, whatever produced its base value: a fixed fee, a recurring retainer, or resourcing-based revenue. One particular use of the stack, a negative modifier that nets off what earlier claims already billed, gets its own article next: progressive billing.