Selling a lot but not earning: where the money goes

There is a sentence people who sell in chat say more often than they admit: "I worked the whole month, I sold loads, and at the end of the month there's nothing". It is not a feeling. It is the symptom of a number that is not there.

Turnover is not profit

It sounds obvious put like that, but it is exactly where people trip. Turnover is what comes in. Profit is what is left after taking off what that item cost you.

And "what it cost you" almost nobody writes next to the selling price. It sits in a supplier's invoice, in a message, in memory. So when you give a discount — "go on, 180 instead of 200" — you do not know whether you are giving up a slice of the profit or selling below cost. And below cost, sold a lot, is the fastest way to work for free.

The three places where money is lost

1. The discount by eye. You do it on the selling price, without seeing the margin. On some items the margin is 40 percent, on others 10: the same discount on the latter takes you into a loss. 2. The item that sells a lot and earns little. The most insidious: it feels like your best product because you always sell it, but each unit leaves you almost nothing. Meanwhile the one that really earns sits on the shelf. 3. The small expense you don't count. The packaging, the bag, the bit of tape: they are cents, and cents multiplied by three hundred orders are the money that "isn't there" at month's end.

What you need to know, and when

Not a balance sheet. One figure next to every item: the cost. And you need to see it at the moment you decide the price or the discount, not at the end of the month.

Then, every so often, a view from above: which items actually make you money, which just make you work.

How Yataio helps

In Yataio every item has two prices: cost and selling. You write them once, and from then on the app knows what is left on each unit. When you give a discount on a document, you do it knowing what you are discounting.

With the Pro version there are statistics: how much you have taken, what you sell most, who buys most — and which items bring the profit, which are not always the ones you sell most. They export to CSV and Excel, if you want to look at them calmly or hand them to whoever does your accounts.

It is the number that was missing: profit per item, seen before deciding the price. Advertising and platform fees you add to the count yourself, as you always have — but this time you start from a base that exists.

Cost and selling price are explained in the guide, statistics here. If the problem is instead who has not paid yet, I wrote about it here.