A total that has been calculated twice and come out the same both times is not thereby a total anyone knows to be right. This paper asks what one set of decision records takes an executed calculation to have settled when it prices a purchase, a contract or a budget line by multiplying each line's quantity by its unit price and adding the lines. It reads seventeen authored cases from AEGIS, a studio of the RISCON family: every case in AEGIS's calculation programme whose run executes that rule. All seventeen are synthetic settings written in Korean, not real events; every quantity, price and unit in them is the author's assumption, and the English quoted is this study's own translation.
Four findings follow. The records turn the replayed total into an instrument, a line in a draft budget, a ceiling, a reserve price or a baseline, and the observations they plan for later measure actual prices against it. The same records call their inputs fixed or set in the reasons they give for a recommendation and assumed in the runs' own notes, and they name prices and quantities as what they do not know. They defend the separate lines against averaging and merging, yet their questions about how unit prices should be allocated ask for a basis the multiplication does not give. And the budget a total is set against, the costs a line leaves out and, in a few runs, the unit a total is labelled with stay outside the lines. Read beside work on the line item, budget requests, anchors and reference classes, the total cost of ownership, partitioned prices, allocation bases and mental accounting, the set shows how a designed record makes an assumed total into the figure that later prices are measured against.