88 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.
$500,000 of operating cash on $2m of sales is a 25 % cash margin against a 15 % net margin — ten points of comfort. The same company with $100,000 of cash reads 5 % against 15 %, and that is ten points of warning.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
$8,000 of wages on $25,000 of revenue is 32 %. Add $1,800 of employer contributions and the same week reads 39.2 % — a seven-point move with no change in staffing.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
A $24,000 van with a $4,000 residual over five years is $4,000 a year of expense and not one dollar of payment. Change the residual to zero and the charge becomes $4,800.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Five incomes of 10,000 to 90,000 give a Gini of 0.38. Divide every one of them by ten and the answer is still 0.38 — the measure sees proportions and nothing else.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
25 million of revenue across 250 people is 100,000 each. Move fifty of them to a supplier and the same revenue reads 125,000 — a 25 % improvement in a productivity measure, with the same work being done.
Daniel Okonkwo · 3 min read
500,000 of liabilities against 1,200,000 of assets is 41.7 % debt, 58.3 % equity and a debt-to-equity of 0.71. The third one runs to infinity as the equity vanishes; the first cannot pass 100 %.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
5 million of operating profit on 20 million of capital employed is a 25 % return. Against a cost of capital of 8 % that is a spread of 17 points; at 6 % it would be a spread of −2, and every extra euro invested would destroy value.
Camille Laurent · 4 min read
50,000 of net income on 200,000 of revenue is 25 %. Two identical businesses can show 22.5 % and 15 % on the same operations, with the entire gap coming from how they are financed.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
60,000 of operating income on 200,000 of revenue is 30 %. It sits between a gross margin that depends on accounting policy and a net margin that depends on debt and tax.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
200,000 of revenue less 120,000 of cost of sales is 80,000 of gross profit and a 40 % margin. Everything the business spends after that comes out of the 80,000 — and out of nowhere else.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Buying at 100 and selling at 130 is a profit of 30 %, measured on the cost. Measured on the sale it is 23.08 % — the same trade, and a gap of nearly a quarter of the figure.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
EBIT of 500,000 against interest of 50,000 is a cover of 10×. Refinance at a rate 3.6 times higher and the same business covers 2.78× — and neither figure has looked at the principal.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Net income of 50,000 on equity of 250,000 is an ROE of 20 %. The same profit on 500,000 of equity is 10 % — the extra ten points came from the debt, not from the business.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
150,000 of net operating income against 120,000 of debt service is a coverage of 1.25 — the usual threshold. It also means a 20 % fall in income wipes the cover out entirely.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Making something for 12, selling it wholesale at a 40 % margin and letting the retailer take 55 % puts it on the shelf at 44.44 — 3.7 times its cost, with two reasonable-looking margins.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Current assets of 150,000 less current liabilities of 100,000 gives working capital of 50,000 and a ratio of 1.5. Whether that is comfortable depends on what the 150,000 is made of.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
180,000 outstanding against 1,200,000 of annual sales is 54.75 days of collection and 6.67 turns a year. On thirty-day terms, that gap is a quarter of a million financed for free.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
7,000 units made against a capacity of 10,000 is 70 % utilisation. The reflex is to call the other 30 % a loss; queueing theory says it is the reason the line still delivers on time.
Lena Hoffmann · 3 min read
At 85 % monthly retention the average customer stays 6.7 months and is worth 224. At 95 % they stay 20 months and are worth 373. The lifetime is a reciprocal, and reciprocals explode.
Lena Hoffmann · 3 min read
120 units sold out of 400 received is 30 %. Whether that is a success depends entirely on how long it took, and the rate on its own does not carry the answer.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Opening stock 40,000, purchases 120,000, closing stock 35,000 — the cost of goods sold is 125,000, and it is larger than the purchases because the shelf gave up 5,000 of what was already there.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
A gap of 1,800 is a shrinkage rate of 3.6 %. The percentage is the number that travels; the absolute figure is the one that pays for the fix.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Selling 100 a day with a ten-day lead time and 300 units of safety stock, you reorder at 1,300 — not because 1,300 is a comfortable level, but because that is what ten days of selling costs.
Camille Laurent · 3 min read
Going from a 95 % service level to 99 % raises the z-score from 1.645 to 2.326 and the safety stock from 346 units to 488. The last few points of availability are the expensive ones.
Lena Hoffmann · 3 min read
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