A good month and a profitable month are not the same month. If you resell anything — prints, garments, components, coffee, stock of any kind — your revenue figure describes what your customers paid, not what you were left holding. Those two numbers can move in opposite directions, and the one everybody watches is the one that hides it.
Two fields fix this. Here’s what they mean, where to put them, and how to read what comes out the other end.
The two numbers
Unit price is what the customer pays you for one of something. It’s the number on the invoice, and it’s the only one they ever see.
Cost price is what that one thing cost you before you sold it — the wholesale price, the materials, the print run divided by the number of prints. It never appears on an invoice, a PDF or a receipt. It exists purely so the maths can be done.
The gap between them is your margin:
- Margin per unit = unit price − cost price. Sell a $40 print that cost you $16 and you made $24.
- Margin percent = that margin as a share of the price. $24 of $40 is 60%.
The percentage is the one worth learning to read, because it survives comparison. A $24 margin sounds identical on a $40 print and a $400 commission, but one is keeping 60% and the other 6%.
1. Put the cost on the item
Go to Items → New item. Name and unit price are the required pair; the field that does the work here is Cost price.
Enter what one unit costs you. Not the invoice total from your supplier — one unit. If a box of 50 blank shirts cost $325, the cost price is $6.50.
As soon as both numbers are in, a line appears under the fields showing margin per unit and the percentage of the sale price it represents. This is worth pausing on. It’s the moment a lot of people discover that their most popular product is their worst one.
The field beside it, Stock on hand, is optional and independent. Fill it in and Quick Sale counts it down as you sell, warning you when an item is nearly gone. Leave it blank for anything that isn’t a physical object — services, hours, bookings — and nothing about stock will ever be mentioned to you again.
2. Sell it, either way
Both selling routes carry the cost across for you. You never type it again.
On an invoice: hit New invoice, choose your client, then Add from catalog and pick the item. The line arrives with the price filled in and the cost attached behind it. Set the quantity and send as normal. Your client sees a completely ordinary invoice — the cost is not on it, not in the PDF, and not on the pay page.
Through Quick Sale: at Quick sale, tap the item’s tile once per unit sold, take the money, done. Same cost, carried the same way, plus stock decremented if you’re tracking it.
One condition worth being clear about: an invoice only counts toward profit once it’s actually paid. Quick Sale receipts are born paid, so they count immediately. Invoices join the figures the moment you mark them paid or the payment lands.
3. Why the cost is frozen at the moment of sale
This is the part that seems like a technicality and isn’t.
When you sell an item, the cost is copied onto that sale line and stays there. Reports never goes back and asks the catalog what the item costs today. So when your supplier raises the wholesale price from $16 to $19 and you update the item, everything you sold at $16 keeps reporting the profit you actually made.
Get this wrong — and plenty of spreadsheets do — and last quarter’s profit silently rewrites itself every time a supplier changes their price list. Your history stops being history. Here it doesn’t: update your costs whenever you like, as often as you like, and the past stays fixed.
4. Read it in Reports
Open Reports. Above the revenue chart you’ll find a Profit block with three figures:
- Revenue from these items — what those sales brought in
- Cost of those items — what they cost you to buy or make
- Gross profit — the difference, with your margin percentage beside it
Below that sits Most profitable products: your top earners ranked by profit rather than revenue, each with quantity sold, revenue and its own margin. This list tends to be the useful one. The product at the top of your sales chart is often several places down this one.
5. What to do with the answer
The numbers are only worth collecting if they change a decision. Four that they usually do:
- Reprice the thin ones. A product under about 30% margin is doing a lot of work for very little. Often the fix is a modest price rise nobody notices — margin moves far faster than price.
- Push the fat ones. If something clears 65% and sells steadily, that’s where more of your attention belongs, whatever its position on the revenue chart.
- Check your bundles. Discounts come off the price and never off the cost. A 25% discount on a 30%-margin product leaves you almost nothing — worth knowing before you offer it.
- Reconsider the busy work. A high-revenue, low-margin line that takes a lot of handling is sometimes just an expensive way to look successful.
If you sell services, not things
Leave cost price at 0 and stock blank. A consulting hour has no cost of goods in this sense, and the Profit block will correctly leave it alone rather than pretending your time was free inventory.
Mixed businesses are common and handled fine — sell prints and design work, and the profit figures describe the prints while the revenue figures describe everything.
The shape of it
Cost price on each item once. Sell however you already sell. Then read Reports for the number that revenue can’t tell you: not how much came in, but how much of it you got to keep.