Cost per accepted change $ AC Cost Per Accepted Change

For teams

Templates

Drop-in artifacts to start measuring cost per accepted change without building infrastructure first. Designed for engineering and finance leaders running a pilot.

Spreadsheet · XLSX · ~12 KB

Quarterly tracker

A multi-window tracker with the formula and conditional formatting baked in. Open in Google Sheets, Excel, LibreOffice, or Numbers — fill in the five cost components and the accepted change unit count, and the bottom line, trend percentage, and color-scaled view of cost per accepted change update automatically. Includes four quarters of example data showing a realistic trajectory and an Instructions tab.

Download tracker (XLSX)

Document · Page · Print to PDF

Quarterly review template

A single-page review template for the recurring leadership conversation: executive summary, the number with prior-period comparisons, component breakdown, what changed, leading indicators, hypothesis and next-quarter focus, and methodology notes. Print-friendly — save to PDF and circulate, or copy the structure into Notion / Confluence / Google Docs.

Open the template →

How to use them together

  1. Download the tracker. Each measurement window adds one row. Fill it in monthly or quarterly.
  2. Run the review every quarter using the review template, pulling numbers from the tracker.
  3. Keep the accounting steady. Same hourly rates, same exclusions, same definitions across windows.
  4. Pair with a leading indicator. Change failure rate, acceptance rate, or DevEx score.

See the quick-start playbook for the full 90-day sequence and the how-to-use page for why aggregate, time-series, group-level use is the only defensible reading of this metric.


More templates coming: vendor evaluation checklist, board-deck slide layout, post-incident attribution worksheet. Open an issue at the repo to request or contribute.