The Engine
The Standardization Engine.
30 portfolio companies. 30 different naming conventions. One clean dataset. Our engine automates the tedious mapping work so you don't have to.
How standardization runs
One company. Three views. Same numbers.
Step 1
Company A's chart of accounts
What the source-system export looks like before normalization.
- Cost of Goods Sold
- Marketing Expense
- R&D - Engineering
- Salaries & Benefits
- Office & Admin
- AWS Hosting
- Other Expenses
Step 2
Mapping rules
Engine-generated; reviewable + auditable per company.
- Cost of Goods Sold → Direct Costs
- Marketing Expense → Growth Spending
- R&D - Engineering → Product & R&D
- Salaries & Benefits → People Costs
- Office & Admin → General & Admin
- AWS Hosting → Infrastructure
- Other Expenses → Other Operating (surfaced in Mapping Review for re-mapping)
Step 3
Normalized portfolio view
Comparable across every company in the portfolio.
- Direct Costs
- People Costs
- Growth Spending
- Product & R&D
- Customer Success
- Infrastructure
- General & Admin
- Other Operating
Eight standardized categories. Editable.
Editing this taxonomy is a content-layer change. No deploy required. Below is a sample of how source-system labels map into the standardized categories.
| Category | Definition | Source labels | Excludes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Direct Costs | Costs directly tied to delivering the product or service. | Cost of Goods Sold, COGS, Direct Costs, Cost of Revenue | General overhead, sales commissions on bookings. |
| People Costs | Total cost of compensation, benefits, and payroll taxes. | Salaries & Benefits, Personnel Costs, Wages, Payroll + Benefits | Independent contractor payments, which are not payroll. |
| Growth Spending | Acquisition, brand, and growth-team operating spend. | Marketing, Mktg, Advertising, Demand Generation | Product engineering R&D, customer-success ongoing renewal cost. |
| Product & R&D | Engineering and product-team operating spend. | R&D, Engineering, Product Development, Software Development | Direct cost of running production infrastructure (under Infrastructure). |
| Customer Success | Ongoing post-sale customer-facing spend. | CS Salaries, Implementation, Customer Support, Account Management | Pre-sale SE / sales support (under Growth Spending). |
| Infrastructure | Cloud, hosting, and production-system run cost. | AWS, Cloud Hosting, Server Costs, Infra | SaaS tools used internally (under General & Admin). |
| General & Admin | Internal-operations spend not directly tied to product or growth. | G&A, Admin, Office Expenses, Legal & Accounting | Direct customer-facing finance / billing operations (under Customer Success). |
| Other Operating | Operating costs that do not fit the above. | Other Expenses, Misc, Sundry | Anything in the standardized buckets above. Accounts that land here are surfaced in Mapping Review for re-mapping rather than left to accumulate. |
Clarifi maintains AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit, role-based access, and audit logging of significant actions. SOC 2 Type II audit is underway. See the security page for details.
Under NDA
Request the full taxonomy
Every customer can request the complete chart-of-accounts taxonomy and per-category mapping rationale under NDA.