Orders

Sells its engineers' time to three clients, and builds one product of its own.

Same screen, other company —Mehta Auto Sahyadri Systems

Promises TIME, and a release to itself. Its unit is an hour or a point, its capacity is who is free next month, one client pays in dollars, and every single person is a Corto user. Nothing below is a second Operations module. It is one commitment table, one promise record and one at-risk rule, rendered in the words of whatever this particular thing is — and the rule that finds a disagreement about the word “done” is written once and fires in both companies.

engagement

Warehouse integration, phase two

$186,000

For Northwind Logistics Inc. · Time and materials, billed monthly

Contracted in dollars because that is what the client signed. Corto never converts it: a rate needs a date, a date makes it an estimate, and Law 2 suppresses rather than estimates.

Promised 5 Oct 2026 · 35 days later than first given

31 Aug 2026 → 21 Sept 2026 · Nikhil Barve: “The client changed the warehouse mapping after the build had started. Their change, our date.” · told Rahul Menon, Anjali Rane

21 Sept 2026 → 5 Oct 2026 · Nikhil Barve: “Kartik was on the Vaayu pilot for three weeks. Ours, not theirs.” · told Rahul Menon, Anjali Rane

Integration build372 of 480 hours
UAT support0 of 120 hours

Nikhil Barve owns it · Rahul Menon is the one who reaches the customer if the date moves · Kartik Bhave · Lead engineer · Omkar Pawar · QA

engagement

Store rollout, 40 outlets

₹42,00,000

For Vaayu Retail Pvt Ltd · Fixed fee, three milestones

Promised 31 Oct 2026 · never moved

Pilot, four outlets1 of 1 deliverablesticked · 0 deliverables counted
Handed over on 2 August. The client has still not signed the acceptance note, so it is delivered and not accepted — which is where the money sits.
Rollout, 36 outlets11 of 36 deliverables
Handover and training0 of 1 deliverables

Two meanings of done

Delivery says done when the work was handed over. The client says done when they accepted it. They are 1 deliverables apart. The gap between the two is where a services company's money actually sits.

Nikhil Barve owns it · Rahul Menon is the one who reaches the customer if the date moves · Kartik Bhave · Rollout lead

sprint

Sprint 31 — route planning

For Sahyadri Systems itself — nobody outside is waiting on it · Two weeks, the team's own commitment

A sprint has no invoice, and putting a rupee figure on one would be an estimate with a person's salary inside it. The field is empty on purpose.

Promised 4 Sept 2026 · never moved

SPR-2 · Save a planned route8 of 8 pointsshipped
SPR-3 · Reorder stops by drag5 of 5 pointsshipped
SPR-4 · Share a route with a driver13 of 13 pointsticked · 0 points counted
Farhan ticked it when the code was complete. It is not behind the flag for any customer yet, so Sneha has not counted it. Both are true and neither is wrong.
SPR-7 · Print a route sheet0 of 8 points
Not started. It was pulled in at planning over Omkar's objection that there was no test data for it.

Two meanings of done

Engineering says done when the code is complete. Product says done when customers have it. They are 13 points apart. The same disagreement as a factory's line and its gate, and it costs the same thing: a promise that reads as kept while nobody outside has received anything.

Farhan Qureshi owns it · Sneha Vaidya is the one who reaches the team if the date moves · Ritika Sen · Engineer · Omkar Pawar · QA

Work done and not yet invoiced

the signature finding, in the dialect of a company that sells time

Corto’s cash-conversion finding is inventory plus debtor days, less creditor days — and a company like this has no inventory, so the finding as built simply cannot run. Its equivalent is WIP days, and it is usually the worse of the two: finished stock sits in a shed where somebody trips over it, and unbilled work sits nowhere at all.

Warehouse integration, phase two$5,544
372 hours delivered, 240 invoiced, 132 not · oldest sits from 8 Jul 2026
June and July were invoiced. August was not, because the client asked for the mapping change mid-month and nobody agreed which hours belonged to which scope.
Store rollout, 40 outlets₹10,50,000
Fixed fee, so the money follows a signed acceptance rather than hours. · oldest sits from 2 Aug 2026
The pilot was handed over on 2 August and the acceptance note has not come back. Nothing can be invoiced against it until it does, and nobody has chased it in 29 days.

Where the hours went — August 2026

Billable8,630 h67% of the hours available
On our own product2,240 hNot billable and not waste. The product team is paid for by the services business, and counting them as under-utilised would be a lie the number tells itself.
On the bench2,010 h14 people had no billable work booked

Billable hours against available hours, from timesheets. Bench is not idleness — it is people with no billable work booked, which is a fact about the sales pipeline as much as about them, and it is shown as a company number rather than a person's, because a per-person utilisation league table is exactly the ranking Law 4 exists to prevent.

Delivered, and accepted

handed over

signed off by the client

Delivered against accepted, which is the two meanings of done in the services dialect. The gap is a number and it is also a conversation nobody has had. The oldest has been waiting 29 days.

The meetings a product team runs, and what Corto does about them

PLANNING, STANDUP, REVIEW, RETRO — and Corto builds almost none of them, on purpose. A standup is people saying what they did and what is in their way, which is the evening check-in that already exists, and asynchronous suits a company across three floors and two cities better than a 9:45 call. A review is the week, which already exists. Planning is deciding a sprint's scope, which is a commitment getting its lines. The RETRO was the last to be built, because its output is a change to how the team works rather than a record of work — so Corto keeps the rule the team sets and checks it against the records next time.

Planningalready in CortoThe sprint's scope lines, agreed. It is a commitment being opened, not a new kind of record.
Daily standupalready in CortoThe evening check-in (/calendar/checkin), asked in the person's own words and read the next morning; the sprint standup (/tools/sprints/standup) for a team that runs sprints. Nobody stands anywhere.
Reviewalready in CortoThe week — what was committed, what shipped, and beside every tick what the person actually said.
Retrospectivealready in Corto/people/retro — went well, did not, and rules with owners. Corto checks each rule against the records before the next one and says how; a rule the team broke opens the next retro.