For the body that sets the mandate

A public sector employers’ council, a treasury board secretariat, a ministry overseeing a portfolio of employers. You do not sit at any of the tables, and you answer for all of them.

The record is held in Canada · Your documents stay in your own systems

The advantage to you

Whether a table stayed inside its mandate becomes a matter of record rather than a matter of reporting.

The mandate is recorded where it is used, at the table it governs, and what was settled against each limit is recorded next to it. The question is answered by the record the employer already keeps rather than by asking them to write you a memo about it.

Costings across a portfolio are done the same way, against the same published statutory rates carried with their sources, so a figure from one table can be set beside a figure from another and mean the same thing.

What is hard about this today

Latency: You find out where a table is when somebody tells you, which means you find out late, and the thing you are told is a summary written by a party to it.
Comparability: Twenty employers cost an offer twenty ways. The differences are usually in the assumptions rather than the arithmetic, and the assumptions are rarely written down anywhere you can see them.
The per person problem: Statutory contributions have annual ceilings that apply to each person, so the cost of a percentage increase does not scale with total payroll. A model built on an average and a headcount gets a number that is wrong in a direction nobody notices until ratification.
Afterwards: An auditor general, a public accounts committee or a freedom of information request asks what happened at a table, and the answer has to be assembled from the employer’s recollection.

What changes

Mandate as a record: What was authorised, by whom, when, and with which limits, recorded at the table it applies to. Settlement against each limit is recorded as it happens, including whether it fell inside.
One method: Every table costing against the same published rates, each carried with the source it came from and the date it was published, and stating plainly where something is not carried rather than substituting an estimate.
Disagreement, separated: Where the two sides differ on a number, the assumptions behind it can be put beside each other so that a disagreement about facts is separated from a disagreement about position. A table that resolves the first one early spends its time on the second.
A record that stands up: Each employer holds its own record of its own table, exportable and independently checkable. That is what an auditor asks for, and it does not depend on us being asked nicely.
Separation, structurally: Nothing in the design lets anyone see inside a party’s private room, and that includes you and includes us. It is what makes a union willing to sit at the same table, which is the condition for any of the rest of it being true.

The honest position on a portfolio view

This is the part where a vendor would normally show you a dashboard. We are not going to, because it does not exist.

What exists today: Everything above is per table. The employer at each table holds its own mandate, its own costing and its own record, and those are sealed to that employer. A central body has no seat and therefore no view.
What does not: There is no view across tables for a body that is not a party to them, and nothing that reports a portfolio position upwards automatically.
Why we think it is worth discussing anyway: The reason a portfolio view is usually a disappointment is that the underlying tables do not record anything consistently, so the view is assembled from returns of varying quality. That part is already solved here. What remains is a question of who may see what, and that is a question of authority and consent rather than of software.
What we would want from you first: What you are entitled to see, under what authority, and what each employer and each union would have to be told about it. We would rather design that with you than guess and build something nobody can lawfully use.

Where the public accountability sits

Canada: The record is held in Canada. Documents remain in each party’s own systems, wherever those are, which is the party’s decision.
Nothing held in the middle: We do not hold the documents of either side at any point. What we hold is the record of what happened, which is the part that has to be neutral.
Checkable without us: Any party can verify its own record on its own machine with a program that never contacts us. A record only the vendor can vouch for is worth very little in front of a committee.
Certification: No SOC 2 report today, with published dates for the audit and the observation window. We treat them as commitments and expect to be held to them.

What it does not do

Named here rather than found later. Anything missing from this list that matters to you is a question worth asking, and we will answer it the same way.

There is no cross table dashboard, no portfolio roll up and no automatic reporting to a central body today. Said plainly because it is the first thing you would be shown by somebody else.
It does not set a mandate, judge whether one was reasonable, or decide whether a settlement complies with one. It records what was authorised and what was settled, and leaves the judgement where it belongs.
It takes no position on whose costing is right. It is not an arbiter and does not produce a number of its own.
It is not a system of record for your organisation unless you decide it is, and we would not describe it that way in a procurement document.
We do not hold a SOC 2 report yet, and we will not describe readiness work as though it were a report.

Where to go next

The trust page · live checks, sub-processors, and the audit roadmap with dates
What your employers are told · the same product, from the table
What the unions are told · worth reading before you ask them to use it

Both sides of a negotiation get the same product. If you want to know what the people across the table are being told, it is on public sector employers, government and mandate holders and unions. We would rather you read all three.