Why We're Talking About Overheads

We're going to walk through a topic that doesn't get much airtime in the trades and SME world - overheads, and the very direct relationship they have with your profit.

It's not a glamorous subject. But it's one of the most common reasons businesses work hard, stay busy, and still don't end up with the profit they expected - and it's often the gap between what your accountant is telling you and what you feel like is actually happening in the business.

Each post in this series looks at a different angle: what overheads actually are, whether your gross profit is really covering them, what they cost you per day or per hour, whether your quotes account for them, and what happens when they're ignored for too long.

The reason we're talking about this isn't theoretical. It's the problem Altomi FoundationStone was built to solve. You input your overheads into FoundationStone (possibly guided by your accountant) and the system takes that input - including the easy-to-miss ones like depreciation - and builds them directly into how you cost and quote jobs. So instead of overheads being a once-a-year number buried in a spreadsheet, they become part of every quote, visible job by job, giving you a real-time view of whether your pricing is actually building profit or just covering costs.

If any of this sounds familiar - accountant says "more profit," you're not sure what else to do - this series, and FoundationStone, are for you.