See the full cost of every assignment. Defend every number.

A mid-market mobility program (50 to 500 cross-border assignees) runs across payroll, tax advisors, immigration counsel, a relocation company, cost-of-living data, housing, insurance and an HRIS: six to nine vendors is what mobility and finance leaders consistently describe to us in diligence. Each vendor answers its own question in its own format. Nobody owns the join. When the CFO asks what an assignment, a corridor or the whole program actually costs, the honest answer takes one to three weeks of manual Excel work, and it is stale on arrival.

The industry’s own benchmarks say this is the norm, not the exception. KPMG’s 2025 benchmarking of 456 multinationals found 72% describe their mobility reporting and analytics as largely spreadsheet-driven, versus 16% using analytics engines; the top obstacles are data spread across multiple systems (55%), cost constraints (44%) and lack of data integrity (43%). EY’s 2026 survey adds the trust ledger: only 51% of employers say their mobility data is accurate, just 47% call their platforms reliable, and 62% of mobility team time goes to reactive ad hoc requests.

The stakes are not small numbers. A long-term assignment typically costs two to three times the assignee’s fully loaded salary, and companies routinely discover the true figure only after the assignment ends. ECA prices the full annual package for an expatriate middle manager at roughly USD 267,000 to 379,000 depending on market, and a three-year family assignment can exceed USD 1 million. Meanwhile demonstrating ROI has become the number one challenge for 31% of mobility leaders, and 97% of employers expect cost reductions within twelve months. Pressure to cut cost, and no instrument to see it.

Built for the files you actually have.

Drop in CSVs, spreadsheets and system exports from any of your vendors. Ask & Chart profiles each file, infers types, currencies and roles, and flags quality issues (duplicates, missing amounts, a currency that is really in cents) with a proposed fix for each, for your review. When a vendor changes an export format, schema drift is detected and dependent figures pause rather than silently break.

The join is the hard part. So the join is the product.

Your payroll calls her an employee ID, the relocation vendor a file number, the tax firm a case reference. Ask & Chart’s key magnet finds the matches across systems, ranks the candidates with evidence, and warns where a join would fan out or double-count. You confirm each join once; from then on every figure computed across that join is deterministic. This is the difference between a dashboard and a model you can defend.

Every figure carries its own audit trail.

Every number Ask & Chart shows is computed by a version-stamped engine from confirmed data, never generated by the AI. Expand any figure and you see its provenance: the source rows, the confirmed joins it crossed, the methodology and data versions it used (tax gross-up methodology, cost-of-living tables, compute model, snapshot date). When a works council, an auditor or your CFO asks where a number comes from, the answer is attached to the number.

Compare the moves before you commit to one.

Host location, policy tier, assignment type, side by side, each scenario computed from your own ingested stack rather than generic assumptions. Corridor choice alone can move six-figure line items: allowances run near half of total assignment cost, UK immigration fees approach USD 30,000, London school fees near USD 90,000 per year. Incumbent tooling sells cost estimates per report or meters them in annual tiers; Ask & Chart computes them on demand, each with a visible calculation trail.

Finance-grade, from day one.

The mobility pack ships the surfaces a program actually runs on: a program dashboard with variance to budget, assignment cost build-ups that read like a financial statement (compensation, housing, relocation, education, tax and social, immigration, each line with home and host currency and a source tag), policy configuration with version history, a scenario workspace, and a discrepancy scorecard that reconciles payroll actuals against vendor invoices and estimates. Gross-up calculations follow an EY-reviewed methodology.

Assignment letters become data. Assignees stay protected.

Assignment letters, vendor invoices and tax equalization statements enter through a six-stage extraction pipeline where every extracted field is verified against the source document by a human before it becomes data. Assignee-identifying fields are tokenized at rest: analytics run on protected tokens, and revealing an identity requires a permission gate and leaves a log entry. Program-level insight without passing personal data around in spreadsheets.

Enterprise suites (Topia, Equus AssignmentPro).

Capable platforms, built and distributed for the top of the market: Deloitte runs a formal alliance reselling Equus-based mobility management, and Mercer’s own cost-estimate reports are produced with AssignmentPro under license from Equus. Neither publishes pricing; buyers who have run the procurement tell us to expect six figures annually before implementation. If you have 2,000 assignees and a mobility technology team, they are the standard. At 50 to 500 assignees, they are a machine you cannot feed.

Full-service RMCs (Cartus, Sirva BGRS).

Service depth, at service prices, under financial strain: Sirva passed to its lenders in 2024 after ratings downgrades on roughly USD 610 million of facilities. Full-service relationships are bespoke and unpublished; buyer-side diligence puts sustained engagements above the level a mid-market program can justify, and the analytics layer is an add-on to the service contract, not a product you own.

Data subscriptions (Mercer, ECA, AIRINC).

Excellent reference data: cost-of-living tables, package benchmarks, per-report cost estimates. They are inputs to a decision, not a reconciled program view; the projection you buy is built from their assumptions, not your payroll. Ask & Chart treats them as suppliers, not competitors: if you license Mercer or AIRINC data, Ask & Chart ingests it and reconciles it against your actuals.

DIY: Excel plus the annual Big 4 review.

The real incumbent, at 72% market share by KPMG’s count. No license fee, and no defensible number either: weeks per CFO question, single-analyst risk, and from the 2027 reporting waves onward, pay structures that need to be explainable with data. The spreadsheet was never the problem. The unreconciled feeds behind it are.