Where the month actually went.
Revenue, direct costs, and overhead into gross, operating, and net margin: the drift caught on a page before it becomes a cash problem.
Revenue
Service calls, projects, maintenance, add-ons: the period’s billings.
Cost of goods sold
The hands that did the billed work.
Operating expenses
Utilities, office, vehicles not on jobs, fees.
Net profit
$24,000
What the period actually kept, after direct costs and overhead.
- Total COGS$120,000
- Gross profit$130,000
- Gross margin52%
- Operating expenses$106,000
- Net margin9.6%
Your inputs, your arithmetic. No benchmark table tells you what your margin “should” be. Your costs do.
Read carefully
The math is easy. The assumptions are the work.
Gross margin is the trade’s truth
Revenue minus materials, direct labor, and the iron that did the work. If gross is thin, no amount of office discipline downstream repairs it: the pricing or the job mix is the problem.
Operating costs are a choice
Rent, admin, marketing, insurance: each line is a decision someone made once and the business kept paying. Read them yearly like they are new.
A P&L should point at an action
Pricing, labor planning, cost control, or service mix: if the statement does not suggest one of those, it was read as a scoreboard instead of a map.
Close, compare, decide
The month-end rhythm: close the numbers, compare against last month and the same month last year, decide one change. Repeat.
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See the margin before the bank does.
On the record, the P&L stops being a quarterly archaeology project: what closed, what it cost, and what is still out are the same numbers the crew already worked.
Coming from a suite? We’ll extract your records.
Rather talk first? Email the team.