64 guides on business. Showing the 48 most recent.
Pricing, payroll, cash and the ratios a lender or an investor will ask about. These guides define each indicator before computing it, and say which convention they follow where more than one is in use — a margin and a markup are not the same number.
Ranked by how many pages of this site link to them, not by traffic.
End minus start minus break is the easy part. Whether a break is paid and whether it counts as working time are two different questions with different answers by country — plus rounding, where timesheets actually go wrong, and what the tool does with a shift that crosses midnight.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
Salary is not the cost. The ticker applies no loaded-cost multiplier of its own, so the rate box is where you have to put it. And the number is for one comparison: a recurring meeting against the written update that would replace it.
Camille Laurent · 10 min read
You do not need a penalty clause. A European directive gives every business creditor a statutory interest rate and a fixed recovery sum, both due automatically, and a term in the contract trying to take them away is void or presumed unfair. Here are the current rates and what they produce on a real invoice.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
The same company, the same year, reads 1.02×, 1.52× or 2.56× depending on where rent is put and whether principal is grossed up for tax. Two of those pass a 1.25 covenant and one does not.
Camille Laurent · 17 min read
Two regimes get merged into one paragraph everywhere, and they behave nothing alike. Selling a service to a business abroad and selling to a private customer abroad are governed by different articles, different thresholds and different filings. Here is the split, with the current figures.
Camille Laurent · 15 min read
Net sales divided by net fixed assets is one of the easiest ratios to compute and one of the least comparable. The same retailer scored 10× before the lease standard and 1.39× after it — same shops, same sales, same year.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
Return on assets, return on net assets and return on capital employed are one family with two moving parts. On the same balance sheet they read 8.3%, 10.2% and 15.6% — and the two steps between them are exactly the two decisions you are making.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
The heating bill is real and it is small — about a fifteenth of the fuel a car commuter stops burning. The balance only goes negative in three identifiable cases, and one of them is a season ticket. Priced from Eurostat energy data, with the German tax system pushing the other way.
Camille Laurent · 17 min read
The numerator is on your own invoices. The denominator is the problem, and the usual fixes make it worse. How to build one from what you can actually observe, why the served market and the total market give answers a hundred times apart, and why a share on the wrong denominator is worse than no number at all.
Camille Laurent · 16 min read
The threshold everyone asks about exists in France, and it turns out to be the scale figure itself. In Germany it does not exist for meals at all, and in Spain the employee never gets the choice. Three designs, with the instrument and the year behind every number.
Camille Laurent · 21 min read
One person, one salary, one length of service, three answers that differ by more than sixteen thousand euros. The percentage is not applied to the same quantity in the three countries, the duration is built from a different fraction, and only one of the three cuts the payment after six months.
Camille Laurent · 19 min read
Two of these three things are usually not in the law at all, and the one that is works completely differently in each country. Here is what a statute actually guarantees, what comes from a collective agreement instead, and why an Italian leaving voluntarily walks away with more than a French employee who was dismissed.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
The same document has opposite default effects on either side of the Rhine: in France a signed fixed-price quotation forbids any increase, in Germany an estimate carries no guarantee of correctness unless the contractor took one on. Plus the particulars that are general, the ones that are trade rules, and why a free quotation is not free.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read
The migration, the tooling change, the process fix: the most common business case there is and the least documented. The value is avoided cost plus recovered time — and on a $130,000 migration, 60.5 % of the recovered hours have to be genuinely redeployed before the five-year net present value even reaches zero.
Camille Laurent · 18 min read
A day rate is a price, not an income. Between the invoice and the bank balance sit six separate subtractions, and in three European countries they are ordered differently, capped differently and paid at different times. Here is the whole chain with the 2026 figures that are verifiable and an honest note on the ones that are not.
Camille Laurent · 15 min read
The gross salary on the contract is not the price of the job. Three European countries, the same monthly gross, and the employer's compulsory bill differs by nearly a factor of two — because of ceilings, not because of headline rates. Here is the 2026 arithmetic, line by line.
Camille Laurent · 13 min read
It throws away everything after the cut-off, ignores the time value of money, and ranks a project that returns early and then dies above one that returns steadily. Computed: payback prefers the worse project by 1.33 years while net present value prefers the better one by $19,571. And the popular shortcut — one divided by the payback — overstates the true return by 17 points on a five-year asset.
Camille Laurent · 17 min read
The coverage ratio is the gate, the guarantee is the second price and the rate is an output. On a 400,000 loan, cutting the rate by a full point moves the coverage ratio by 0.018 — while two extra years of term move it by 0.216. The whole negotiation is in the wrong place.
Camille Laurent · 19 min read
Everyone asks from what turnover a side activity starts to pay. The question has no answer, because the number that decides it is what an hour of yours is worth — and once that is in the calculation, the threshold stops being a sum of money and becomes a rate per hour that does not move with volume.
Camille Laurent · 9 min read
The usual rule — delegate whenever you earn more per hour than the help costs — is wrong, and wrong in a way that has a formula. Two thresholds, one for a household task and one for a business task, and the ratio between them is exactly one over one minus your marginal rate.
Camille Laurent · 15 min read
The received wisdom is that the tax treatment of depreciation settles the buy-or-lease question. Modelled on a 60,000-euro machine over five years, it does not: it ranks third, and a long way behind. Here is the ranking, computed, and the conditions under which it flips.
Camille Laurent · 15 min read
Everyone runs this calculation forwards, from a rate to an income. Run backwards, from a salary to a rate, it produces a much larger number — on the 2026 French figures, 2.29 times the answer people reach by dividing. Here is the arithmetic, every subtraction named, in France, Germany and Spain.
Camille Laurent · 12 min read
There is a formula, and it is short: your living needs plus the company's fixed annual cost divided by the rate spread. That is why the answer is a threshold and not a preference — and why the threshold sits in four very different places in France, Germany, Spain and Italy in 2026.
Camille Laurent · 19 min read
A $3.30 plate on a $12.00 menu is 27.5 percent. An extra 30 grams of chicken and 6 percent waste push it to 31.65 percent — while a 5 percent supplier increase moves it only 1.38 points.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read
Walked down one $10M P&L: EBITDA of $1.8M, EBIT of $1.1M, net income of $525K. The gap is 70.8 percent of EBITDA — and it is the cost of the assets and the debt the business actually runs on.
Camille Laurent · 7 min read
Everyone quotes 3:1 and nobody states their churn assumption. With $100 ARPU and an 80 percent gross margin, moving monthly churn from 2 to 3 percent drops the ratio from 4.0:1 to 2.67:1 — a pass turned into a fail by one percentage point.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read
Growth rate plus profit margin should clear 40. But 60 percent growth at a minus 20 percent margin scores the same as 10 percent growth at a 30 percent margin — and on $10M of revenue those are opposite companies.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read
The famous transaction fee is one of five layers. On a $40 item with $6 shipping, Etsy's order fees come to $4.62 — and $11.52 if the sale came through Offsite Ads.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read
eBay charges its final value fee on the item plus the postage the buyer paid. A 13.6 percent rate on a $100 item with $10 shipping costs $15.36 — 15.4 percent of the price you actually set.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read
On a $100 domestic card sale the gap is $0.78. On the same sale from abroad with a currency conversion it is $2.78. The headline rate is the part that matters least.
Camille Laurent · 7 min read
A $25 unit does not cost 15 percent to sell. Referral, fulfilment, fuel surcharge, storage and returns stack to $8.14 — 32.6 percent of the price — before you have paid for the product.
Camille Laurent · 7 min read
Click-through rate measures how many people click after seeing your ad or link. Learn the clicks ÷ impressions × 100 formula and typical benchmarks by channel.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
A step-by-step guide to billable hours: separate billable from non-billable time, work out your utilization rate, and project the annual revenue your hours can produce.
Daniel Okonkwo · 5 min read
Burn rate is how fast a startup spends cash each month. Learn to compute net burn, turn it into runway with cash ÷ burn, and read the number before it reads you.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
An employee costs far more than their gross salary. Learn how payroll taxes, benefits and overhead push the total to roughly 1.25–1.4× the salary, with a worked example.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend. Learn what break-even ROAS means, how to find it from your profit margin, and why a ROAS above 1 can still lose money.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Learn how retail markup works, why keystone pricing doubles cost, and the crucial difference between markup and margin — so you set prices that actually cover your costs.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Inventory turnover shows how many times you sell through your stock in a year. Learn the formula — COGS divided by average inventory — and what a healthy ratio looks like.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Understand cost per mille, cost per click and cost per acquisition — how each is calculated, how they relate, and which one to optimize for at each stage of a campaign.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Learn the break-even formula — fixed costs divided by contribution margin — and work out exactly how many units you must sell before you start making a profit.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Customer churn rate measures how fast you lose customers. Learn the formula, why it caps growth and shortens lifetime value, and how to reduce it.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Average order value measures how much a customer spends per order. Learn the formula, why it matters for profitability, and proven ways to lift it.
Daniel Okonkwo · 3 min read
A practical guide to pricing: work out your unit cost, apply cost-plus pricing, understand markup versus margin, and know when to price on value instead.
Daniel Okonkwo · 4 min read
Customer lifetime value estimates the total worth of a customer over the whole relationship. Learn the formula, why margin matters, and how to use it.
Daniel Okonkwo · 3 min read
Customer acquisition cost tells you what it really costs to win a new customer. Learn the formula, what to include, and how to read it against lifetime value.
Daniel Okonkwo · 3 min read
Markup and margin both describe profit on a sale, but from different bases. Confusing them costs money — here's how each works and how to convert.
Camille Laurent · 2 min read
Your break-even point is where revenue equals costs. Here's how to find it in units and revenue, and how to use it to make pricing decisions.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
ROI measures your gain relative to what you invested, as a percentage. Here's the formula, a worked example, and what ROI leaves out.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read