[!todo] Seed note. A starting point, not a finished note yet.
Throughput accounting is the decision framework Goldratt built to replace standard cost accounting inside the Theory of Constraints. It tracks three numbers: throughput (the rate money is generated through actual sales, revenue minus truly variable cost), inventory/investment (money tied up in things to be sold), and operating expense (money spent turning one into the other). Its central move is refusing to absorb fixed overhead into the value of unsold inventory, which is how traditional costing lets a manager post paper profit by overproducing goods nobody ordered. Decisions on product mix and make-or-buy get ranked by throughput per unit of constraint time rather than by unit cost, and the two rankings often disagree. Seeded from Theory of Constraints.