Margin analysis for Australian businesses

A named person on our team owns your file and reviews everything that leaves it. Software does a real share of the grinding underneath it — coding, matching, flagging the obvious gaps — but nothing regulated happens without a person’s judgement, and nothing here is signed or filed by an algorithm.

No — margin analysis is operational work inside your books, not something submitted to ATO. Where a filing does sit downstream of it, inside advisory more broadly, that stays with your registered BAS or tax agent, never with us.

Whatever you already run. Most commonly QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite, Sage, Zoho Books and a handful of others — we work inside your system rather than moving you onto one of our own.

A short, free read-only look at what you already have, and a written note on what we found. A scoping call decides the size of the engagement — nothing here commits you to anything.

There is no published price for margin analysis — it depends on volume, how many entities are involved, and how far behind the books are. We quote after the read-only review, which is free.

Margin analysis sits inside advisory, alongside Cash flow forecasting, Runway analysis, Budgeting and forecasting. Most clients end up buying the category as a whole rather than one leaf at a time, but starting narrow is fine.

The same margin maths applied below the whole-business level — by product or job type, by client, by channel — using the reconciled ledger rather than one blended number. The P&L gives you an average; margin analysis shows what that average is hiding.

Most charts of accounts are built to lodge a BAS and hand annual figures to the accountant, not to answer "which job type makes money," so revenue and costs sit in a handful of generic accounts. Adding job, client, or class tags is what makes a breakout possible, and for a first engagement that recoding is usually the bulk of the work.

Gross margin is the standard figure — revenue less cost of sales. Contribution margin strips out only the costs that move with volume, like materials and gateway fees, and leaves fixed costs like rent or salaried admin out of the per-job number, which is why it's often the more useful figure for a pricing or capacity call even though it isn't an accounting-standard-defined term.

It shows you where the margin actually sits, so the decision is informed. It doesn't make the call for you, and it doesn't weigh in on the tax consequences of the change — that's a conversation for your accountant or registered tax agent.

No. Margin analysis is management reporting about where money is made in the business as it exists today. It doesn't ascertain or advise on a tax position, and it doesn't recommend an entity structure — those stay with your accountant or registered tax agent under TASA.

Only to make sure GST collected isn't sitting in the revenue account, which would inflate reported margin. We don't ascertain your GST liability — that's a BAS service reserved to your registered BAS agent under TASA 2009 s.90-10 — we simply make sure the coding is clean.

That's common, and it's handled by documenting the definition rather than guessing. We state in writing which costs count as variable for your business and apply that definition consistently, so the contribution margin figure means the same thing from one period to the next.

No. We apply whichever method your accountant has already set — FIFO, weighted-average, or otherwise under AASB 102 — consistently across the breakout. We don't recommend a change to produce a different margin number; that decision stays with your accountant.

Usually on the same cadence as monthly reporting, so a margin trend is visible as it develops rather than reconstructed once a year. Businesses with fast-moving job mix or a strong seasonal pattern often review it more often; scope is set on the initial call.

A reconciled general ledger, enough job or sales history to see revenue by product or client even if it isn't tagged yet, and visibility into direct costs — materials, labour and on-costs, freight, gateway fees. The first pass usually goes into turning that raw data into something that can actually be sliced.