When I first start evaluating a financial statement, I try to group costs together logically. It is far too typical for most businesses to rely upon the canned reports and these are almost always prepared in GL Number order. But a clearer picture can be developed by grouping the costs of revenues separate from the overhead and the overhead into 4 main groups.
The overhead groups I prefer follow the Throughput model:
- Labor Overhead
- Marketing Overhead
- Facilities Overhead
- General
A little bit about the groupings: Labor overhead includes not only those who are on payroll but also consultants and outsourced staffing. So, for instance, if your company outsources janitorial services, this expense is reported in labor, not facilities. My approach is to put all labor into labor overhead, including production labor, unless it is truly variable – which most is not these days.
General is the catch-all classification. There are two services I typically would group into general – legal and auditing. While both are still people performing services, these are services which your business typically cannot provide internally. Otherwise, if it cannot clearly fit into one of the other three groups, put it in general for now.
Let’s say your business does $1.0 Million in sales monthly. Your direct material costs are $350K and you have depreciation on equipment which manufactures the products you sell of $50K. Throughput, which is the measure of how much money you generate to cover overhead and profit, is $600K.
Continuing our analysis:
- Labor Overhead runs $400K or 66.7% of throughput
- Marketing Overhead is $50K or 8.3% of throughput
- Facilities Overhead is $50K or 8.3% of throughput
- General Overhead is $30K or 5.0% of throughput
In total you are spending $530K to generate $600K of throughput. 88.3% of every dollar you bring in is consumed by your overhead, of which most is tied up in labor costs. You see, when you separate out your labor into different categories, such as production labor, sales commissions, accounting and office staff, you can lose sight of the total amount you are spending to generate throughput. It isn’t that these separate amounts are not important, but when you are looking at leveraging your business, having expenses scattered everywhere can lead to a misunderstanding.
Properly grouped, we can start analyzing. There would be two points of reference to the analysis, average and best case. Both of which can be found in the prior year’s records. For the average, I would recommend taking the last 5-7 years of information and reformatting to match the groupings above. You are looking for a trend and what you will likely find is that throughput has remained fairly steady but labor overhead has crept up. It isn’t necessarily bad, but it does indicate that more money is being paid out for peoples time but the company is not getting much in return.
The comparison to best case can be a real eye opener though. Here you find the year where there was the most profit and then compare where you are today with the overhead structure in place when the company made vast profits. In almost all cases, you will find that the company increased spending across the board relative to that maximum profit year.
So, instead of giving a bonus to the employees and management, the company raised base compensation. The company went from a 50,000 sf facility to 100,000. When you study this great year you start realizing that perhaps it was luck and you were betting it would continue – only to find out it didn’t.
GAAP statements have their purpose. But managing to GAAP can be dangerous to the bottom-line. It is all too easy to want to capitalize everything into your inventory but that means that today’s costs are probably being buried and will be recovered in a later year. But in the meantime, your costs are possibly growing out of control which is impacting your current cash flow picture and may even hurt you in the future if you have to reduce prices to be competitive.
Consider using the Throughput model for evaluating your internal financial statements. I think you will be surprised at how much information it can provide you to help you make better business decisions.
If you would like more information or would like to discuss how effective analysis can help you understand your operations and profitability, feel free to contact mecontact me anytime. I am here to help.
Accounting Clarity 