Exchange

Most plans don’t just spend time. They move things: materials get bought, hours get hired, deliverables get produced and handed off. The Exchange tab is the market-side view of a plan. It is where you price the things the plan can buy or sell, and where Topolog shows you what you are expected to be holding, and how much cash you are up or down, once the whole plan has run.

Two halves

The tab stacks two sections that read together top to bottom:

Initial unowned deliverables (editable). The prices you author: deliverable types the plan can buy or sell but does not own outright.
Final deliverable state (computed). The read-only forecast: what the plan is expected to be holding after full execution, and the net cash that implies.

Initial unowned deliverables

An “unowned” deliverable is something the plan acquires or releases rather than makes: an hour of an electrician’s time, a bundle of appliances, a delivered cabinet set. Each type carries up to two prices:

Buy price is what it costs you to acquire one unit. Acquiring a unit spends that amount.
Sell price is what you receive when you release one unit. Releasing a unit brings in that amount.

Every price is denominated in your account currency, so there is no per-row currency field to set: the symbol shown next to each amount is simply your profile currency. Add a type, give it a buy or sell price (or both), and Save. Leaving an amount blank means that side is not priced. Types are listed alphabetically in both halves of the tab.

Final deliverable state

Below the editor, Topolog simulates the whole plan and reports the expected end state, split into three human-friendly groups:

Agents (hired). Capacity the plan takes on, such as contractor hours. The headline is net hired (hired minus released).
Owned. Deliverables the plan produces and consumes itself. The headline is net held (produced minus consumed).
Unowned. The priced types from the editor above. The headline is net held (acquired minus released), and because these carry prices, each row also shows its net cash.

At the top of the section, a single line rolls the priced rows up into the plan’s overall net cash: total proceeds from everything you sell, minus total spend on everything you buy. A negative number means the plan costs you money on net; a positive number means it nets out in your favour.

How the numbers are computed

The counts are not a naive sum of what every task declares. They are the median (P50) across a 500-sample monte-carlo run, the same simulation that powers the Spectrum and Money tabs. That matters when a plan has gated work: a task that only fires when an outcome goes a certain way contributes to the end state only in the samples where it is actually reached. So a deliverable behind a coin-flip gate shows up at roughly half its full count, not its full count, and the net cash reflects the same weighting.

Hovering a row shows its P10, P50, and P90 end count, plus the expected spend and proceeds behind the cash figure, so you can see how wide the range is, not just the midpoint.

When you can skip it

Like the Money tab, the Exchange tab earns its keep only when a plan actually trades. If no task produces, consumes, acquires, or releases anything, and no priced types are declared, the forecast is empty by design and there is nothing to author. Personal goals usually live without it; procurement-heavy or build-and-sell plans lean on it.

Money - per-task cost, the cash trajectory, and budget feasibility.
Pareto - the spend-versus-success frontier.
The TOL language - how deliverables, owned and unowned, are declared on a plan.