Program Budget

Lighthouse Financial Services Company — The full budget derivation behind the Program Charter's $27,904,000 authorization ceiling: labor by team, non-labor by category, the tranche release schedule tied to the gates, contingency draws and remaining reserve. Authorized at the 11 June 2026 Gate 1 second convening; spend figures current as at 16 October 2026.

1. Purpose & How to Read This Budget

This document derives the $27,904,000 ceiling the Program Charter authorizes, and reports where the program actually stands against it at the status date. It is not a program-level cost/schedule performance report — §8 explains why this program deliberately does not publish one — it is a budget derivation and a tranche ledger. Every figure below is computed from the same source the Gate Decision Framework, the Gate Conditions Register and the Gate 2 Readiness Assessment draw from, so none of these documents can drift out of agreement with each other on a dollar figure.

2. Budget Summary

3. Labor Budget by Team

Fifteen teams, ramping by stage across the program's life. Every team's rows in the underlying 90-row roster reproduce this envelope exactly in both hours and cost; per-person cost equals hours times rate, and allocation percentage is derived from hours over each person's engagement window rather than stated independently — the roster solver was rebuilt once after an early version satisfied the arithmetic by pegging a PMO Lead at 5% and a scheduler at 100%, which is exact without being defensible.

The Gate Review Board's own six seats are the smallest envelope and the highest blended rate — oversight time from the program's most senior people, costed like any other team rather than treated as free. IT — Annuity Administration Platform is the single largest team by headcount, consistent with extending rather than replacing the incumbent platform being the highest-effort line in the build (Decision D-07).

Where the labor total comes from — and where it deliberately does not

The $17,980,000 line was built upward from the roster, never downward from a target: each of the 90 people carries stated hours over a stated engagement window at a stated rate, team envelopes are the sums of their people, and this table is the sum of its envelopes. The direction matters because a labor budget derived top-down — a total allocated across teams to make the plan close — produces exactly the arithmetic this table shows while committing nobody to anything. Cost is distributed, never recomputed: rounding a blended rate and multiplying it back across a roster drifts by thousands, so displayed rates are derived from cost over hours, not the reverse.

Reading the blended rates as evidence

The rate column is the table's built-in plausibility check, and it should look uneven. Actuarial — Pricing carries one of the highest blended rates on modest hours — credentialed specialists engaged deep rather than wide; the platform team carries the most hours at a mid-table rate — sustained configuration effort, not scarce expertise. A labor budget whose blended rates converge toward a comfortable average is usually one that was allocated rather than built, because real teams do not cost the same. The one deliberate outlier is the Board itself: six seats, the smallest hour envelope, the highest rate — priced so that governance time appears in the cost of the program that consumes it.

4. Non-Labor Budget by Category

Distribution enablement, wholesaler training and launch marketing is the largest single non-labor category — larger than the platform configuration line — reflecting that this program's hardest problem was never technical: it is getting three IMO partners to commit volume in writing, the same gap GC-04's closure surfaced rather than resolved.

The two build vendors are structured differently on purpose

Cordelane (platform configuration and licensing) and Brightpath (illustration and quoting engine) are not two instances of one arrangement. The Cordelane line is governed by a gated SOW whose work packages release with the program's own tranches — the SOW mirrors the stage-gate structure so the vendor's authorization can never outrun the Board's. The Brightpath engine is the smaller line but carries the sharper risk concentration: it feeds L2 illustration validation, where defects are compliance matters rather than build matters, and its earlier capability limitation (I-02) is what GC-01 resolved by cutting launch crediting strategies from five to three — a budget line whose scope was reduced by a gate condition rather than a change order.

What this table does not contain, and why the absences are decisions

Three lines a reader might expect are absent on purpose. No capital strain — the statutory capital the product consumes is real money on a different clock, covered by the CBA, and summing it with program cost would double-count neither and confuse both. No post-launch operating cost — the post-launch window is not a stage and no gate funds it; steady-state cost belongs to the product P&L the CBA models. No management reserve beyond the 9.0% contingency — a second, unminuted buffer is where quiet overruns go to hide, and the design intent is that the only path to more money passes through a gate with minutes.

5. Tranche Release Schedule

Base funding of $25,600,000 releases in four tranches, one per gate. No stage's money is available before its own gate votes to release it — this is the mechanism, not a policy statement, behind the Charter's claim that $27,904,000 is a ceiling and not a baseline.

Why the tranches are unequal — the shape is the risk posture

The four tranches are not a total divided by four; their shape encodes where the program chose to put money at risk. Stage 1 is deliberately small: it buys the answer to “should this exist?” at the lowest price that produces a decision-grade business case — and its size is why the Gate 1 recycle, painful as it was, repriced the product rather than the company. Stage 2 is the largest because development is where commitments become irreversible: vendor build, hedging infrastructure, filing preparation. Stage 3 funds proving what Stage 2 built, and Stage 4 — the smallest funded stage — buys readiness, not construction. Read as a sequence, the shape says: spend little to decide, most to build, less to prove, least to launch — and at every boundary, a Board that can stop.

6. Contingency Reserve & Draws to Date

The 9.0% gate contingency of $2,304,000 is held by the Gate Review Board, not by the Program Manager (Decision D-09). A draw against it requires a gate decision. Two draws are recorded:

The I-01 draw is not a cost overrun in the ordinary sense — it is the itemized price of the Gate 1 recycle loop, fully accounted in the Gate 1 Recycle Memorandum §7. The GC-03 draw funds the external peer review Gate Condition still open; its status is tracked in the Gate Conditions Register and the Gate 2 Readiness Assessment, not here.

7. Spend Position at the Status Date

51% of the total ceiling released to date; the remainder sits behind two gates that have not yet convened.

How to read this position, and how not to

The honest summary of the table above is one sentence: the program has spent 49% of what its gates have released, part-way through the second of four funded windows. Two commonly requested restatements are refused here by design. “Percent of total budget consumed” divides by a ceiling that includes money the Board may never release — it flatters early and punishes late, and is wrong in both directions. “Forecast at completion” requires extrapolating across two unreleased tranches, which manufactures precisely the commitment the gate structure withholds; the program's genuine at-completion statement is conditional and lives in the gate packages, where each release decision is made with the remaining money still on the table. A reader wanting the fuller mechanics of the four funding states should use the Stage Budget Console, which is built from the same facts module as this document and cannot disagree with it.

8. Why No Full-Program Earned Value Baseline

Every other program-management suite in this portfolio publishes a baselined cost and schedule performance measure across the program's full life. This one does not (Decision D-10), and the reason is structural: at the status date, only Stages 1 and 2 are funded. A program-level variance would compare real spend to a budget for Stages 3 and 4 the Board has not yet approved — that is not a variance, it is a forecast dressed as a measurement. Performance is reported within the released tranche only, which is what §5 and §7 above do. The full argument, including why this is the same reasoning the Gate 5 Post-Launch Review will eventually close the loop on, lives in the Methodology Guide §5.

9. Budget Governance & Change Control

This suite carries no separate change control log. A material change to scope, cost or schedule is a gate re-submission — the mechanism that produced the Gate 1 recycle — not a logged exception to an otherwise-stable baseline. In-stage change that does not rise to that level is absorbed inside the tranche already released and reported at the next gate rather than tracked as a separate artifact. This is a deliberate methodology position: a change log implies a baseline worth protecting from drift, and this program's baseline is the gate itself, re-established every time one convenes.

10. Financial Controls & Reporting Cadence

The automated guard referenced above is not a figure of speech: every dollar amount that appears anywhere in this suite is checked against this document's derivation before publication, and a figure that cannot be traced to a recognized line item fails the check rather than shipping.

11. Document Control & Related Documents

Related documents: Program Charter · Gate 1 Business Case Package · Gate 1 Recycle Memorandum · Gate Conditions Register · Gate 2 Readiness Assessment · Stage-Gate Methodology Guide.

Maintained by B. Trombley, Program Finance Manager, under the authority of C. Tyrrell, NPD Program Manager and Chair of the Gate Review Board.