Is Your GP Figure Lying to You?

Gross profit feels like good news. You've sold a job, paid for the materials and labour that went into it, and there's a healthy chunk of money left over. Surely that's profit, right?

Not quite. Gross profit is what's left after direct job costs — but it still has to cover everything else involved in running your business before anything becomes real, bankable profit. Rent, insurance, admin, vehicle costs, software, accounting fees — all of it has to come out of your combined gross profit across all your jobs.

This is where the GP figure can be misleading. A GP percentage that looks healthy on a single job might still fall short once it's spread across your overheads for the month. The real question isn't "is my GP good?" — it's "is my GP, across all the jobs I do, enough to cover my overheads with profit left over?"

If you don't know your overhead number, you can't answer that — which means you don't really know if your GP is good at all. And this is exactly the gap Altomi FoundationStone closes: it connects your job-by-job GP directly to your real overhead costs, so you can see — in real time — whether what looks like a healthy margin is actually building profit, or just covering the cost of staying open.