Many businesses don’t make money in their first years because it can take a lot of money to open a business (think of all the supplies, insurance, licensing fees and rent agreements you might need) and it could take some time to attract customers.

Understanding how much money your business makes and the costs associated with running the business are important for long-term success.

Find your break-even points

Your business’s break-even point is when the money you make from business sales covers your business’s expenses. While your goal may be to make money, not just cover expenses, reaching your break-even point is an important step on your path to profitability.

You can calculate the break-even point for each product or service you sell.

Using your break-even points
Once you’ve calculated your business’s break-even points, you can use this information along with your budget to make better business decisions. You can set goals for yourself and your staff, see how your break-even points change if you raise or lower prices or determine if it makes sense to offer a new product based on its costs.

And here’s a great tip if you want to make money rather than simply breaking even — add your desired profit to your fixed costs. For example, if you want to make a certain amount per a month, add up all your fixed business expenses and then add in that extra amount. Then aim to “break even” with the new fixed cost.

Calculating a product’s break-even point
You’ll need to know several pieces of information before doing break-even calculations:

• Your business’s fixed costs. The total amount of fixed expenses, such as rent or insurance, that you pay each month.
• Your average cost per product. The average cost of creating or purchasing the product. These costs can be variable as materials, labor, commissions and other costs vary, but you can use the average cost per product in your calculations.
• A product’s sale price. How much you sell a product for. If your product’s sale price is lower than your average cost per product, you’ll need to lower your costs or increase your prices (or both) to make money.
• Your contribution margin. The sale price of your product minus your cost for creating the product. 
• Your contribution margin ratio. You can also find your margin in terms of a percentage or ratio if you divide your contribution margin by the product’s price. 

Here are some helpful formulas to use. For these examples, assume it costs $1,000 a month to run your business, $5 to create your product and you sell it for $13:

Break-even point in terms of number of products = fixed cost / (product’s price - your average cost per product)

• 1,000 / (13-5) = 125. Therefore, you need to sell 125 products to cover your monthly expenses.

Break-even point in sales = fixed costs / contribution margin ratio

• 1,000 / .6154 = $1,625. Therefore, you need to make $1,625 each month to break even and cover your cost of business plus the cost to make your product.

Profit and loss statements
A profit and loss statement, also called an income statement, revenue statement, t or simply profit and loss, can help you determine your business’s overall financial standing. It’s one of the three main financial statements for businesses — the other two are the balance sheet and cash-flow statement.

The profit and loss statement breaks down your income and expenses to reveal your profit over a specific period of time, such as a month, quarter, year or years. It uses a simple equation to determine this:

Income (also called revenue) – expenses = profit (also called net income)

However, the profit and loss statement breaks down your different sources of income and expenses, helping you better understand how your business makes and spends money.

Using a profit and loss statement
You can find out important information by regularly reviewing your profit and loss statement. For example, you can compare your profits to previous periods to determine if your business is becoming more or less profitable. If you notice your business’s profits are going down over time, you might be able to quickly act and cut expenses or increase sales to remain profitable.

The profit and loss statement can also be helpful when you’re writing or updating a business plan. You can share it with lenders when you apply for a business loan, and you can use the numbers on your profit and loss statement to help you prepare and file your business’s tax documents.

Creating and reading a profit and loss statement
You could create your own profit and loss statement, or start with a template that you can fill in. Or, if you use accounting software, the software may also be able to create a profit and loss statement for your business.

If you’re creating your own profit and loss statement, you may want to use a spreadsheet. There’s a lot of addition and subtraction in the profit and loss statement, and a spreadsheet is less prone to errors and easier to use than doing the math on your own.

A profit and loss statement is generally broken down into different sections. profit and loss statements also use accounting terms that you might not know if you haven’t studied accounting before, and sometimes there are several names for the same thing.

Here’s a breakdown of the terms in the order that they appear on a profit and loss statement and what they mean:

• Revenue/sales. The money your business makes. You can break down the revenue into different types of income, such as income from selling products and income from selling services.
  There’s generally a line under revenue for the money your business lost related to sales. For example, when a customer returns a product, you could include the money you returned to the customer as an expense in the revenue section.
• Net sales/total operating sales. Subtract your revenue-related expenses, such as returns, from your sales revenue to determine your net sales. Your net sales is how much money your business made from selling products and services before you take other expenses into consideration.
• Cost of goods sold/direct costs. Cost of goods sold refers to the costs for the materials and labor it takes to create the items you sold. This is sometimes called direct costs because it’s all the expenses that are directly related to creating your product or offering your service.
• Gross profit/gross margin. If you subtract the cost of goods sold from net sales, you’ll find out your gross profit or gross margin.
• Operating expenses/OPEX. A business’s operating expenses are the additional expenses that it takes to run your business. The operating expenses section can be much longer than the cost of goods sold because you should include and use different lines for any expenses that aren’t directly related to creating a product or offering a service. 
  Some examples are rent, utilities, advertising, travel, training and insurance. Labor costs for employees who don’t have a direct role in creating a product or service, such as a general office manager or receptionist, could also go under operating expenses.
• Total operating expenses. Add up all your operating expenses to find your total.
• Earnings before interest and taxes. The business’s gross profit minus the total expenses. The earnings before income and taxes shows you how much money the business earned before paying interest or taxes.
• Interest expenses. If you have taken out a business loan and are paying interest on the loan, you can list the interest expenses here.
• Net profit before taxes/earnings before taxes. The business’s gross profit minus the total expenses and interest expenses. Or, the earnings before income and taxes minus interest expenses. If you don’t have any interest expenses, the earnings before taxes will be the same as the earnings before income and taxes.
• Income taxes. Add up the total amount of money the business spends on local and national income taxes.
• Net income/net earnings. Subtract the income taxes from the earnings before taxes to find the business’s net income. This is the total amount of money the business earned during the specific period.

Here are two more terms you may hear in relation to a profit and loss statement:

• Top line. The top line is at the top of the profit and loss statement, and it’s the same as your revenue/sales. If your business’s top line is growing, it means you’re selling more products or services. An increasing top line can mean your business is growing, but it won’t lead to more profits if your expenses increase at the same time.
• Bottom line. The bottom line is at the bottom of the profit and loss statement and it’s your net income or net earnings. Bottom line growth means your business is making more money.

Those are the basics to a profit and loss statement. It isn’t very complicated on its own — it only requires addition and subtraction. The difficult part is making sure all the information you use is correct. To do this, you’ll want to make sure you have a good system for keeping business records, such as accounting software where you record every business sale and expenses.