Why Aurgus Publishes Its Methodology (And What Early Clients Get)
Last updated: November 11, 2026
Aurgus publishes its rebate accounting methodology — the ERP gap assessment, the diagnostic framework, the full content library, and the pricing page — before anyone pays anything. We do this because we are early and have no customer testimonials to offer. The methodology is the trust signal.
Most software companies build trust with testimonials. Logos on a homepage. Quotes attributed to a VP of Finance at a company whose name you recognize. The implied message: someone like you already chose us — it worked out.
We don’t have that. We’re early. We’ve built the tool, the methodology, and the content. We haven’t closed our first paying customer yet. We’re not going to manufacture social proof we don’t have.
What we do instead is publish the methodology itself. This article explains what that means, why we made that choice, and what it means for anyone who is considering becoming an early client.
What We Publish, and Why
The ERP Rebate Gap Assessment
The gap assessment at /erp-rebate-gap-assessment/ is seven scored questions about how your ERP currently handles rebate accounting. It covers accrual estimation, settlement reconciliation, audit documentation, and the degree to which your system of record matches your vendor agreements.
We publish it in full — not as a teaser, not behind a form — because a potential client should be able to assess their own gap before they ever talk to us. If the assessment reveals no meaningful gap, you don’t need Aurgus. If it surfaces four or five areas where your ERP is falling short of what ASC 705-20 governance requires, you’ll know that before we do.
That is the point. We want you informed going into any conversation with us, not persuaded.
The Ten-Article Content Library
Weeks 1 through 10 of our content calendar document the rebate accounting problem from first principles: the failure modes, the settlement consequence, the CAS partner view, the year-end variance problem, what governed rebate accounting looks like, the ERP vendor questions you should be asking, what a productive vendor outreach email contains, and what the diagnostic conversation covers.
None of it requires you to pay anything. If you want to understand ASC 705-20 governance deeply enough to make your own assessment of your exposure — and of Aurgus — the library is there. The article on governed rebate accounting is the clearest statement of the standard we’re building toward.
We publish this content because the practitioners who need Aurgus most are the ones who have already done the thinking. They’ve read the standard. They’ve tried to build it in spreadsheets. They know why the ERP falls short. By the time they find us, we want them to recognize that we’ve done the same thinking they have — not because we told them so, but because they read it.
The Diagnostic Conversation Framework
The rebate accounting diagnostic describes the four areas we explore in an initial conversation: the accrual estimation methodology, the settlement reconciliation process, the audit documentation posture, and the degree to which the close process is governed versus ad hoc.
We publish this because a CAS partner or controller who knows what to expect from a diagnostic conversation is more likely to have a productive one. Surprises in an evaluation process create friction. We’d rather you come in knowing what we’re going to ask and having thought about your answers in advance.
The Pricing Page
The pricing page shows $600 per month, flat, no setup fee, cancel any time. No “contact sales for pricing.” No custom quote. No package tier that requires a conversation to decode.
We price this way because pricing opacity is a sales tactic, not a trust signal. If you need to know what Aurgus costs before you decide whether to invest time in an evaluation, you should be able to find out in 30 seconds. You can.
What This Says About Where We Are
We are early. We have built Aurgus — the governed calculation layer for rebate accounting, the accrual estimation engine, the settlement reconciliation workflow, the audit documentation output — and we have built the methodology that explains how to use it and why it’s structured the way it is. We have not yet taken it through dozens of distributor month-end close cycles with paying clients.
That is an honest statement about where we are. It is not an apology for it.
The methodology is not a draft. The gap assessment questions are not placeholders. The content library is not filler. We built these because we believe the rebate accounting problem in wholesale distribution is real, consequential, and structurally underserved — and we have been specific about why we believe that across ten articles that anyone can read and disagree with.
We are not asking you to trust customer testimonials we don’t have. We are asking you to evaluate the methodology directly. If the framework is wrong, the gap assessment will reveal that. If the content doesn’t demonstrate genuine expertise in ASC 705-20 governance, that will be apparent too. We’re publishing everything precisely because we’re confident enough in what we’ve built to let it be evaluated before anyone pays anything.
What Early Clients Get
Being one of Aurgus’s first clients has specific, concrete advantages. Here is what they are:
Direct access to the founding team.
You are not going into a support queue or an onboarding workflow designed for a customer base of thousands. The team that built the tool is the team you work with. If a question requires a methodology decision, that decision gets made in a conversation with the people who built the methodology.
Influence over what the tool measures.
The first clients shape what Aurgus tracks, how it structures the governed close, and what the audit documentation output looks like. The core framework is set, but the specific measurements — which program structures trigger which flags, what the materiality thresholds are, how the settlement variance explanation is formatted — those are genuinely in motion. Early clients participate in those decisions. That is not a marketing claim; it is a description of how early-stage software actually develops.
$600 per month, no setup fee, cancel any time.
See /pricing/ for the current terms. The price does not change based on the number of rebate programs you run, the number of users, or the volume of transactions processed. The methodology is designed for distributors with complex rebate programs; the pricing is designed not to price them out.
A diagnostic conversation before any commitment.
We will not ask you to subscribe before we’ve had a substantive conversation about whether Aurgus is the right fit for your situation. The diagnostic covers your current process, the gap the assessment surfaces, and what a governed close would look like in practice for your program mix. If that conversation doesn’t surface a clear use case, we’ll say so.
The Honest Trade
Being an early client means you’re evaluating something that is production-ready but not yet battle-tested by a large installed base. You will encounter edge cases in your rebate program mix that we haven’t seen before. Some of those will require methodology work, not just configuration.
What you get in exchange is a lower-friction evaluation, direct access, and genuine influence over how the tool develops. That is a real trade. We won’t oversell it.
The distributors and CAS firms that benefit most from being early clients are the ones who have already thought carefully about their rebate accounting governance — who know the gap exists, have tried to close it, and are looking for a tool built by people who understand the problem at the same level they do. If that description fits your situation, the gap assessment is the right place to start.
Start Here
If you haven’t taken the gap assessment: /erp-rebate-gap-assessment/. It takes about ten minutes and gives you a scored view of where your ERP rebate accounting stands against ASC 705-20 governance requirements.
If you’ve already done the assessment and it surfaced a gap: the rebate accounting diagnostic is the logical next step. It describes what the first conversation with us covers, so you can decide whether that conversation is worth your time before you schedule it.
For subscription details: /pricing/.
If you want to understand what the first conversation with Aurgus looks like — including what you leave with regardless of outcome — it is documented at /answers/what-happens-after-you-reply/.
For a structured approach to evaluating whether Aurgus fits your program before committing, see How to evaluate Aurgus before you buy it.