What is the difference between gross profit and net profit on the income statement for a merchandising business?

Gross profit is a key profitability figure for a small business. It's calculated by subtracting cost of goods sold from sales revenue. Here's how you can use gross profit, and the gross profit margin, to measure your business's production efficiency.

Gross profit is a business's sales revenue minus its cost of goods sold (COGS). In other words, gross profit removes the direct costs of developing and producing the good or service from the total revenue received from its sale. Sales revenue, COGS, and gross profit are all line items that appear at the top of a business's income statement. In most instances, gross profit will be a larger figure than net profit.

A business's gross profit can also be displayed as a percentage of total sales revenue; the subsequent percentage is the gross profit margin. You can use the gross profit margin to measure your business's production efficiency. This is especially useful when you track your gross profit margin over time or compare the metric to others within the same industry.

What is the difference between gross profit and net profit on the income statement for a merchandising business?

What Is Cost of Goods Sold?

Because you remove COGS from sales revenue to calculate gross profit, it is important you know what to include in COGS. Your business's COGS includes all of the following:

  • Raw materials costs
  • Direct labor costs
  • Shipping and handling costs
  • Storage costs
  • Overhead costs tied directly to production, such as the utilities required to keep machinery running

You should exclude expenses from COGS that are not directly related to production. Items to exclude from COGS include selling, general, and administrative (SG&A) expenses, depreciation, amortization, interest, and tax payments.

In certain cases, you may include depreciation in COGS in a roundabout way. For example, if your business assigns depreciation expense on a piece of machinery to overhead costs that are directly linked to production, it may be included in COGS.

Calculating Gross Profit

The formula to calculate gross profit is:

Sales Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) = Gross Profit

For example, your business made $500,000 in toy sales this year. You spent $200,000 on materials to build the toys, $10,000 on shipping and handling costs, and $100,000 on wages for your production line employees. The total direct production expenses you should include in COGS is, therefore, $310,000. If you subtract $310,000 from $500,000 in toy sales, you arrive at $190,000 of gross profit.

Gross profit can also be used to calculate a common profitability measure, gross profit margin. The gross profit margin is simply your gross profit displayed as a percentage of total sales revenue. While gross profit is displayed as a dollar amount, gross profit margin is always displayed as a percentage.

Gross profit margin is used to analyze a business's success at managing their production processes and efficiency. Gross profit, displayed as a dollar amount, may fluctuate considerably year-over-year depending on your business's sales revenue fluctuations. To get a more accurate representation of the effects of your direct production costs on your business's goods or service, it's useful to look at the gross profit margin.

In the example above, your gross profit margin is $190,000 divided by $500,000, or 38%. You can compare this 38% metric to your previous years' gross profit margins. You could also use this metric to compare to other businesses within the same industry.

Because different industries have vastly different business offerings and gross profit margins, it is not useful to compare across different industries. However, you can use gross profit margin to compare your production efficiency with close competitors with similar business models.

What Factors Affect Gross Profit?

If you're analyzing your financial statements for a change in your gross profit margin, here are some items to consider. Some of the main factors that influence fluctuations in gross profit include changes in:

  • Sales Volume
  • Raw materials costs
  • Shipping and handling costs
  • Direct labor costs
  • Utilities directly tied to production

Any substantial increase or decrease in these items will affect your business's gross profit. You may have no control over certain items, such as new legislation for minimum wage or a utility rate increase.

However, you can manage others through effective planning. For example, you can increase sales through a targeted marketing campaign. You could also perform time studies on your production staff or machinery usage to suggest areas for improvement or automation. Gross profit can tell you a lot about your business if you know where to look.

What is the difference between the gross profit and the net profit for a business?

Net profit reflects the amount of money you are left with after having paid all your allowable business expenses, while gross profit is the amount of money you are left with after deducting the cost of goods sold from revenue. You need to calculate gross profit to arrive at net profit.

What is net income in merchandising business?

There are three calculated amounts on the multi-step income statement for a merchandiser - net sales, gross profit, and net income. Net Sales = Sales - Sales Returns - Sales Discounts. Gross Profit = Net Sales - Cost of Merchandise Sold. Net Income = Gross Profit - Operating Expenses.

What is net profit and gross profit with example?

Net Profit = Gross Profit - Expenses. Returning to our Elegant Eyewear example, say the company had SG&A expenses of $50,000 and interest expense of $2,000. The company's net profit would be: gross profit of $235,000 minus $50,000 of SG&A expenses, minus $2,000 of interest expense = net profit of $183,000.

How do you calculate net profit in merchandising?

Since net profit equals total revenue after expenses, to calculate net profit, you just take your total revenue for a period of time and subtract your total expenses from that same time period. Here's an example: An ecommerce company has $350,000 in revenue with a cost of goods sold of $50,000.