Margin by line
- Brackets 24.5% · Fittings 22.9% · Custom tooling 14.8% · All 19.6%
Financial Intelligence · Expanded Financial Intelligence
Multidimensional Profitability Intelligence
Calculate supported profitability and margin by customer, contract, project, product, location, department and business unit, respecting the accounting and allocation as…
Demonstration: Harlow Precision Components (fictional) · Manufacturing. Fictional data and a scripted answer.
The situation
- Organisation
- Harlow Precision Components (fictional)
- Who is asking
- Business unit finance director
- Industry
- Manufacturing
- What happened
- Overall margin looks acceptable, but the director suspects one product line is carrying the others.
The question asked
Which product line is weakest after discount and freight, and what happens if freight or material costs move?
What it reads, and who can see the result
- Sales by product line, last quarter exportUnits and average price per line.
- Standard costs registerUnit cost per line from the costing system.
- Freight and discount summary exportAverage discount and freight per unit.
- Reads
- Units, prices, unit costs and the freight and discount averages for three product lines.
- Does not read
- Customer names, individual invoices or personal data.
- Permission
- Read access to the costing and sales reporting views, granted by the finance systems owner.
- Who sees it
- The finance director and the product managers of the three lines.
Try it
Change the assumptions. Every result and the answer below are recomputed from them, and a warning appears when a result crosses a stated limit.
- Brackets: revenue
- USD 207,360
- Brackets: cost
- USD 156,540
- Brackets: margin
- 24.5%
- Fittings: revenue
- USD 322,560
- Fittings: cost
- USD 248,560
- Fittings: margin
- 22.9%
- Custom tooling: revenue
- USD 446,400
- Custom tooling: cost
- USD 380,325
- Custom tooling: margin
- 14.8%
- All lines: margin
- 19.6%
Custom tooling is below the 15% margin floor the business unit set.
The answer
Simulated answer. Written for this fictional case, not produced by a live model. Only the figures in it are computed, from what you decided above.
Overall margin is 19.6%; custom tooling is the weak line at 14.8%.
Brackets earn 24.5% and fittings 22.9%, after 4% average discount and USD 1.20 freight per unit [S1][S3]. Custom tooling carries the highest unit cost and the largest absolute freight bill, so it is the line most exposed to a change in either [S2].
The overall figure hides this: the three lines together look acceptable because the two high-volume lines pull the average up. Move freight or the material increase to see which line falls first.
Relies on: S1 · Quarter sales by lineS2 · Standard cost sheetS3 · Freight and discount summary
No approval is needed for this result: it is read-only insight, and nothing consequential happens because of it.
What it produces
Where to look first
- Review the quote policy for custom tooling before the next price list.
- Treat the freight rate as a quoted cost, not an overhead.
Limits of this example
- Costs are standard costs, not actual: a variance report would refine them.
- Volumes are held fixed; a price change would move volume, which this example does not model.
- This is a scripted demonstration on fictional data. No model was called and no real organisation, person or result is shown.
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