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MarginGraph

What is hiding in my figures?

Send your management accounts, annual accounts or a supplier quote. We analyse first and show you what we found. You only pay if you want the rest, and only if it clears €90.

2 min readMarginGraph

Most owners have a file and a feeling that something is in it. The feeling is usually right, and it is usually not where they are looking.

Send the file. We analyse it first and charge afterwards, if at all.

What that looks like on a real file

Not a mock-up. Both halves below are what the shipped code returns on one Dutch wholesaler's management accounts, anonymised and otherwise unchanged.

What was in the file

A wholesaler with €2.4m of revenue

Real management accounts, anonymised. Seven staff, imports from Asia, sells to retailers across Europe.

Line2026 trend2026 budget
Revenue€2,389,560€2,850,000
Outbound freight€81,800€111,200
Recharged freight-€45,400-€62,700
Fulfilment€101,000€256,500
IT costs€82,700€61,500
Payroll€526,000€600,000
Marketing€75,400€112,800

Seven lines. No cleaning, no template, no questionnaire. Everything below was produced from this table by the code that ships.

Free

€0
Here is what your file says.

  Turnover, 2026 trend                  €2,389,560
  Against 2026 budget                   16.2% below
  Left after direct costs               37 cents in every euro
  Biggest cost that moves with volume   Fulfilment, 4.2% of turnover
  Biggest cost that does not            Payroll, 22.0% of turnover
  Every euro of labour earns            €4.54 of gross profit (was €4.75)

  Of every euro of turnover:

  Fulfilling the order                  8 cents (was 13)
  Winning the order                     3 cents (was 4)
  Running the company                   25 cents (was 23)

We read it and found €57,600 of exposure across 2 findings. The moves we would actually recommend inside that are worth €25,290.

What we found, and what each one is worth:

  1. How much of your outbound freight you recover from customers    €36,400
  2. IT costs against budget                                         €21,200

€9 unlocks which line each of these sits on, the arithmetic behind it, and what to do about it including how far you can safely go.

What their business looks like, and the size and subjects of what we found. Which line each one sits on, the arithmetic and what to do about it is what you are buying.

Unlocked

9
Found €57,600 of exposure. The moves we would actually recommend inside it are worth €25,290. Paid €9.

1. A cost you pay and the line that bills it back to customers are two
   separate rows. When the second is smaller than the first, the difference
   is being paid out of your own margin, usually because a rate was set
   years ago and the cost moved since.
   Yours:  You recover 55.5% of your outbound freight from customers.
   Worth:  €36,400 at most (2026 trend).
   Do:     Recover 5 more points (55.5% to 60.5%). Worth €4,090, and it stays worth it as long as it costs you less than 0.5% of turnover in lost business.
   Check:  €81,800 of cost against €45,400 recovered is 55.5%. The remaining €36,400 is the ceiling, reached only at full recovery.
   Steps:
     Recover 5 more points (55.5% to 60.5%)      €4,090  safe while you lose under 0.5% of turnover
     Recover 10 more points (55.5% to 65.5%)     €8,180  safe while you lose under 0.9% of turnover
     Recover 25 more points (55.5% to 80.5%)    €20,450  safe while you lose under 2.3% of turnover
     Recover all of it (55.5% to 100%)          €36,400  safe while you lose under 4.1% of turnover

2. The plain comparison your accounting package already makes: what you
   spent against what you planned to spend. It is here because a budget
   nobody looks at is the same as no budget.
   Yours:  IT costs is €21,200 over 2026 budget.
   Worth:  €21,200 at most (2026 trend).
   Do:     Bring it back to budget, or restate the budget so it is worth steering by again.
   Check:  €82,700 actual against €61,500 budgeted.

Note the steps. A recovery rate of 55% is a price your customers accepted, not an oversight, so the advice is not to jump to full recovery. It is the smallest move worth making, what it earns, and how much business it can cost before it stops being worth it.

When we find nothing, there is no payment screen

This is the part that keeps the rest honest. An engine obliged to produce something will produce something. Because a thin result costs us nothing to report, the engine is free to say a file is clean.

We read it looking for money you are leaving behind, and found €0.

That is below the €90 we hold ourselves to, so there is nothing to sell
you and nothing to pay. If you want, send a different file.

No refund is ever processed, because no money moved. The guarantee is the order of operations rather than a policy. Before any of it runs, every subtotal in the file is added up and compared with what it says: if the arithmetic closes we read it correctly, and if it does not we name the cell rather than quietly deciding what you meant. See what to send.

How it works

1  you send a file            management accounts, annual accounts, a quote
2  we check we can read it    every subtotal has to add up, or we ask
3  we run the analysis        free, and before any payment screen exists
4  you see what we found      the total, the count, and the largest finding
                              in full, with its arithmetic
5  you decide                 €9 unlocks the rest, or you walk away

Step three happens before step five on purpose. You are not buying a promise that something is in there, you are looking at one of the findings with the sums attached and deciding whether the others are worth nine euros.

What the free half looks like

We found €57,600 across 2 findings in your file. Here is the largest one
in full, so you can check the arithmetic before you decide.

1. You recover 55.5% of your outbound freight from customers.
   Worth:  €36,400 (2026 trend).
   Do:     Reprice the freight line to cost, or set a free-shipping
           threshold above your current average order value.
   Check:  €81,800 of cost against €45,400 recovered is 55.5%.
           Full recovery is worth €36,400.

Still locked (€9 for all of them):
  2. IT costs against budget

That is a real finding from a real Dutch wholesaler. The locked line names the subject and never the amount, because the amount is the finding.

The €90 floor is a mechanism, not a policy

If the engine finds less than €90, no payment screen appears:

We read your file and found €0.

That is below the €90 we hold ourselves to, so there is nothing to sell
you and nothing to pay. If you want, send a different file.

This is the part that makes the rest honest. An engine obliged to produce something will produce something. Because a thin result costs us nothing to report, the engine is free to say a file is clean, and "we found nothing" becomes a shippable answer instead of a commercial failure.

No refunds have to be processed, because no money moved.

What to send, per question

where is my margin leaking     profit and loss for the current period,
                               plus budget or the same period last year

what is my business worth      annual accounts for the last three years,
                               including balance sheets, plus what the
                               owner takes out of the business

is this contract reasonable    the quote or agreement itself, and roughly
                               what volume you do

One file is enough to start. If we need a second one to say something useful, we ask for it by name rather than producing a thinner answer.

The reading check comes first

Before anything is analysed, every subtotal in your file is added up and compared with what it says. If the arithmetic closes, we read it correctly. If it does not, we name the cell and ask, rather than quietly deciding what you meant.

That is not a formality. On one real set of management accounts it produced the largest finding of the lot: a budget that read €147,200 higher on the reporting tab than on the tab where it had been agreed, with every variance column hanging off the wrong one.

The check is deterministic. No model, no judgement, the same answer every time for the same file. It has been run over twenty-two filed sets of statutory accounts and four real Dutch companies.

What we do not do

No sector benchmark whose origin we cannot point at. No authoritative-looking percentage that came from nowhere. Where we state a limit it is one that defends itself, like full recovery on a cost you bill on.

And no figure resting on an assumption without the assumption printed beside it. An amount you cannot re-derive is an amount you cannot act on.

Frequently asked

Guide2 min

Why your profit and loss does not add up

A subtotal that does not follow from the lines above it is almost never a rounding error. Four causes, and how to find which one in ten minutes.

Guide2 min

You recover less freight than you pay. How much is that?

Most wholesalers recover only half of their outbound freight from customers. Two lines from your P&L tell you what that costs, and what to do about it.

Guide2 min

Revenue fell and your costs did not. How do you see it three quarters early?

In euros a fixed contract looks fine during a downturn. As a share of revenue it doubles. That difference is the earliest signal your accounts contain.