Know your numbers - Drilling down on your margins

Anna Stubbs • May 31, 2023

Gains can always be made at the margins. These small incremental gains over a month or a year can have a significant impact on your bottom line. This could be additional profit you make from a single project, a single product or service, a particular geographic area, or a certain type of customer.



Drilling down into your sales and margins gives you great insight into which parts of your business are performing well and which ones need improvement.

Some ideas to help you measure your margins:


1. Use real time and up to date data.
Ideally, use a cloud-based accounting system with daily data feeds from your bank.


2. Determine which ways you want to ‘dissect’ your sales.
E.g. by product or service line, by groups of products, by salespeople, or by region. A region could be defined as online sales versus shop sales.


3. Capture sales by these categories at the time of sale or invoicing.
Adjust your account codes accordingly or use reference fields.


4. Capture the direct costs of these sales by using an inventory or time recording system.
If you’re selling a mixture of labour and materials, make sure you correctly capture both the labour and the material costs.


5. Compare the actual results you are getting with your month by month budget.
Do this at least on a monthly basis.


6. Compare your results with industry expectations.
Consider accessing benchmark statistics from your industry or, better still, get together regularly with similar types of businesses to compare your results. These could be identical non-competing businesses in different locations (meet online) or industry-related businesses in your own region.


7. Seek feedback from us as to how you can improve your reporting of your margins.
We come into contact with many businesses like yours and are familiar with best practice, as well as what doesn’t work!


The first step in improving your results is understanding exactly where you are right now – warts and all. Talk to us about how to drill down into your margins.


"You can't manage what you can't measure." - Peter Drucker

The Man on the Moon Principle

By Anna Stubbs • October 22, 2025
In 1961, President John F Kennedy famously announced his goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out. As we know, in July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon, and were brought back to Earth safely, achieving JFK’s goal.  At a time when most people hadn’t even been on an aeroplane, landing on the moon would’ve felt unachievable and overwhelming. However, such a massive goal united people with a purpose; the story goes that even a cleaner mopping the floor at the space station said his job was to help put a man on the moon. So, how did they make the goal achievable? They broke it down into milestones, with each one taking them closer and closer to achieving their ultimate goal. The first milestone was to achieve lift off. So, they set about resolving this challenge. The next milestone was to reach orbit, so they had a team working on this milestone. Then, they had to reach the moon’s atmosphere, land safely on the moon, take off from the moon, enter Earth’s atmosphere and land safely back down to Earth. You can see how breaking the goal down into milestones gave everyone a more achievable objective to focus on which was less overwhelming. Those milestones were then broken down into the actions which needed to be completed. Each action was essentially a small step towards reaching the ultimate goal.

5 signs you’re undercharging

By Anna Stubbs • October 22, 2025
Are you undercharging for your services? It can be hard to tell, particularly if you’re in a niche industry or you’re a contractor. Costs have been rising, so it may be time to rethink your own pricing.

Understanding your revenue drivers

By Anna Stubbs • October 22, 2025
For your business to make money, you need to generate revenue. You produce revenue through your usual business activity, by making sales, getting your invoices paid, or taking cash from paying customers. So, the better you are at selling your products/services and bringing money into the business, the higher your revenue levels will be. But what actually drives these revenue levels? And how do you get in control of these drivers?