How PaxExact prices a line item

PaxExact never attaches a bare number to a line item. Every unit price — whether it came from a catalog, from PaxExact's own accumulated data, or from a person typing a figure — is wrapped in a pricing record that reports where the number came from, how current it is, and how confident PaxExact is in it. That record travels with the line item on every read.

The record has four parts that matter to anyone checking a number: pricing_state (is there a usable price at all, and is it current), source_class (what kind of evidence produced it), a reason_code when there is no usable price, and a confidence and as_of date describing how much to trust it and how current it is.

pricing_state is a closed set of four values. PRICED means a price is in effect and its basis is current. UNPRICED means there is no price at all — nothing is charged, and nothing is silently defaulted to zero. INSUFFICIENT_DATA means PaxExact has seen relevant prices before but not enough independent evidence to report one responsibly. STALE means a price is in effect, but the thing that produced it — a catalog version, or a set of observations — is no longer current.

This matters because a $0.00 line and an UNPRICED line look identical to a careless reader but mean opposite things. A genuine $0.00 charge is reported as PRICED with the actual figure; an unpriced line is reported as UNPRICED with a reason. PaxExact's contract treats collapsing that distinction as a defect, not a rounding error.

When a line cannot be priced, PaxExact reports a machine-readable reason_code rather than a blank. The reason codes a client or reviewer will see most often are: UNKNOWN_PRICING_CODE (the pricing code isn't in the catalog at all), INVALID_UNIT (the unit doesn't match what that code supports), NO_UNIT (a coded line has no unit to price against), NO_GEOGRAPHY (the estimate has no pricing region set, so only a national default was consulted and nothing was found), INSUFFICIENT_SAMPLES (PaxExact has some observed prices for this code, region and unit, but from fewer independent projects than its own floor requires), and CATALOG_MISS_NO_OBSERVATIONS (no catalog price and no observations exist at all).

A pricing region is required for geography-aware pricing to work. An estimate with no region set still resolves — it just falls back to a national default — and any coded line that still can't find a price reports NO_GEOGRAPHY rather than guessing at a location.

source_class says what kind of evidence is behind an effective price. CATALOG means a managed price list for that region and code. OWN_DATA means PaxExact's own accumulated observations from prior priced lines. MANUAL means a person typed the figure. UNVERIFIED marks a legacy row whose original source is not recorded; it still counts toward totals but is flagged and is never used as evidence for anyone else's own-data suggestion.

Two rules protect a professional's judgment from being quietly overwritten. First, a human-entered MANUAL price always outranks an own-data suggestion — PaxExact keeps computing and showing the suggested figure alongside the human one, but never substitutes it in. Second, when a line is priced by applying a pricing code, a catalog price overrides whatever number the client sent in the same request; the response says so explicitly rather than silently keeping the client's figure.

PaxExact can suggest a unit price learned from an organization's own prior priced lines, but only once there is enough independent evidence: observations must come from at least two distinct projects before a suggestion is reported. Below that floor, a line that would otherwise be OWN_DATA is instead reported as INSUFFICIENT_DATA — a deliberately weaker claim than reporting a number from a single, possibly unrepresentative, project.

An organization's own priced lines stay private to that organization by default. They are not pooled into anyone else's own-data suggestions unless the organization explicitly opts in.

The pricing architecture described on this page — the pricing_state and source_class vocabularies, the reason codes, the human-authority and catalog-override rules, and the own-data floor — is built and running in production. What is not yet true: no production pricing catalog is loaded behind it, and there is not yet enough accumulated organization data for own-data suggestions to fire in practice. Treat pricing figures from PaxExact today as not yet a source of real numbers; the mechanism that will carry them is what this page describes.