2 · The realization gate

Cash by reconciliation, never by multiplication

Capacity becomes cash by reconciliation, never by rate-card arithmetic. Six thousand freed support-hours do not become 6,000 × $52 of value; they become the specific payroll line that was not spent — three backfill reqs closed unfilled, $195,000 — and the general ledger is the ceiling. Hours that reconcile to nothing stay hours, visible as pending conversion. The gate has two paths. Cost avoidance is the clean one: a req closed unfilled, an overtime line that dropped, a tool cancelled — verifiable GL non-events. Revenue uplift is quarantined: an agent-attributed deal enters the cash ledger only when the contract is signed and the GL recognizes the revenue. Until then it stays capacity — named, tracked, not dollarized.

3 · The baseline gate

No baseline, no credit

Before the first dollar is credited to AI, two pre-deployment records must exist. The paired shadow run observes the work with and without the agent before it goes live, and the customer signs its baseline. The independent 12-month sample has a third party verify the pre-agent run-rate, catching the seasonality and trend a 90-day window hides. Together they are the contemporaneous control group the attribution rests on — captured when it still could be. One without the other does not open the gate.

4 · Attribution withholding

Part of every cash entry is withheld, and the withholding is disclosed

No cash entry is credited whole. Each carries an attribution chain — the GL event, the pre-agent baseline, the customer's stated counterfactual, the shadow-period actual, and the residual — and the residual is withheld as a haircut, reported as a band rather than a point, typically 0–30% depending on the strength of the counterfactual. The withheld amount appears beside the realized figure, never hidden behind it. Hours carry no haircut: they are not dollars, so there is nothing to withhold — conversion happens at the realization gate or not at all.

5 · Structural value

Reported apart, on its own clocks

Some value is not a monthly GL event: a 12-person department becomes 4, a contracted capability comes in-house, a workflow's unit cost halves. These are recorded as three separate attestations — organizational, capability, workflow — each signed by a different owner (CFO, product owner, operations lead) so no one person attests the whole structural story, and each on its own expiry clock (12, 24, and 6 months). The organizational figure is stress-tested with a five-year discounted cash flow and a Monte Carlo pass and reported as a 25th–75th percentile range, never a point. None of the three is ever added to the monthly headline, or to each other — the export deliberately has no field where a sum could live.

6 · Evidence classes

Who says so — measured, declared, signed, modeled, reviewed

Every ingredient above carries one of five evidence classes, and the label travels with the number. Measured: system-observed — metered outputs, token counts, telemetry. Declared: a person entered it — the customer-stated baseline time per output is the honest example, and it says so on the row. Signed: a named owner countersigned — GL events, rate derivations, baselines, structural attestations. Modeled: computed under stated assumptions and labeled as such — the structural DCF range, an assisted estimate. Independently reviewed: an auditor or third party re-derived or struck it — the strongest class, and the only one not produced in-house. A lower class never dresses as a higher one.