For companies that ship things

You sell goods. Somebody else picks and packs them. That is where the margin goes.

Between one and ten million in turnover, an outsourced warehouse, and a profit and loss account that looks fine every month. Three things leak in businesses built this way, and all three are already visible in a file you have.

Send your figures See a real analysis first

Free until you have seen what we found. €9 to unlock it, and nothing at all if we find less than €90.

What we find in companies shaped like yours

Freight you pay for and do not bill on

You charge delivery at a rate somebody set years ago. Your carrier has raised prices since, more than once. The two lines drift apart quietly, because neither of them looks wrong on its own.

One trading company recovered 55.5% of its outbound freight from customers. €81,800 paid, €45,400 billed on. Full recovery is €36,400 a year, and the first sensible step, five points, is worth €4,090 and can cost half a percent of turnover in lost orders before it stops paying.

A fulfilment contract that did not notice you got smaller

Pick, pack, storage and handling should follow volume down. Contracts frequently do not, because of a minimum commitment nobody has read since it was signed.

In one quarter turnover came in 46% under budget while fulfilment stayed almost exactly on budget in euros, so nothing was flagged. As a share of the money left after buying, it went from 19 cents to 37.

A subtotal in your own file that does not add up

Before anything else runs, every subtotal is added back up from the lines above it. When one does not reconcile, it is usually a sign typed the wrong way round, and it has been in every report you have steered by since.

We name the cell and the single flip that closes the gap, rather than deciding what you meant. If the file cannot be read, we say so and charge nothing.

Those amounts are from real management accounts, anonymised, and every one of them was produced by the same code that would read your file. Yours will be different. The point is the shape, not the amount.

Four things you can check this afternoon

Without us, and without sending anything. If all four come back clean, you have spent twenty minutes and learned that your figures are in order, which is worth knowing and worth nothing to us.

01Add up what you paid for outbound freight last year, and what you billed customers for delivery. Divide the second by the first. Under 80% is a conversation.
02Take your fulfilment costs as a percentage of turnover this year and last year. If turnover fell and that percentage rose, your contract is fixed where you thought it was variable.
03Take gross profit, not turnover, and express every cost against that. Turnover was never your money. What you bought and resold belonged to somebody else.
04Take one subtotal in your management accounts and add up the lines above it by hand. Most people find it reconciles. The ones who do not, find something.

What to send

Your profit and loss account for the current period, plus the budget or the same period last year. Two periods is what lets us see a cost that stopped moving with your revenue. Excel, CSV or a text-based PDF, straight out of your accounting package. Do not tidy it first.

Add what is in the bank today and we can tell you how long the money lasts as well. There is no cash in a profit and loss account, which is why your accounts can never answer that.

Send your figures

What this is not

Not your accountant, not a consultant, and not another dashboard to log into. Your accounts are built to arrive at a taxable profit in a prescribed order, and they do that properly. Steering needs the same costs sorted by how close they sit to the sale, measured against the money that is actually yours. That is the whole difference, and it is the reason this exists.

Every figure we produce carries its own workings so you can redo it in ten seconds. A finding that does not survive checking gets corrected or refunded, which is in the terms, not just here.