BuildYourBzns vs doing it yourself in spreadsheets
This is not an argument that you cannot do the maths. You can. It is an argument about what happens to the model three months later, when the supplier price moved and the sheet did not.
When your own spreadsheet is the right call
- A small catalog you can hold in your head, with costs that rarely move
- You genuinely maintain it, and it is current today rather than current last quarter
- You want to understand the mechanics yourself before paying anyone
- Cash is tight and the honest answer is that free is what you can afford
When we are
- The model only gets rebuilt when something has already gone wrong
- Costs change often enough that a static sheet is out of date within weeks
- You can produce a number but not decide what to do about it
- The knowledge lives entirely in your head and one file
| BuildYourBzns | A spreadsheet you maintain yourself | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | The tools are free. The paid steps come later, only if you want them | Free, plus the hours you spend rebuilding it |
| Getting your real margin | The Margin Leak Calculator does it, including processing, shipping and returns | Possible, if you remember every cost line |
| Staying current | Built to be re-run whenever a cost moves | Accurate on the day you built it, and drifting from then on |
| Knowing what to do next | The Business Audit interprets the numbers and gives a 90-day order of operations | You decide, from the same numbers, alone |
| Cash and runway | The Cashflow Calculator models it over two years | Doable, and where most home-built models break first |
| Per product or channel | The Operation Profitability Calculator finds the worst performer | Usually the first thing dropped when the sheet gets big |
| What survives handover | Systems the business owns, not a file only you understand | A file only you understand |
What we do differently
There is a version of this page that tells you spreadsheets are amateurish. That version would be wrong. A carefully built sheet will give you your true landed cost per unit and your real margin, and plenty of good businesses run on exactly that.
The problem is not accuracy on day one. It is decay. A model is a photograph of your costs at the moment you built it, and costs move: a supplier reprices, a carrier changes a zone, a return rate creeps. The sheet does not know any of that happened. So the model quietly stops describing the business, usually without any visible moment where it broke, and the next time anyone opens it is because something already went wrong.
The second thing is that a spreadsheet answers "what is my margin" and stops there. It will not tell you whether the right move is repricing, renegotiating your supplier terms at the volume you actually run now, or dropping a product that looks fine on the dashboard and loses money on every sale. That is the gap the Business Audit is for, and it is why the ladder here runs free tools first, interpretation second, and the rebuild only if you want it.
So use the free tools instead of building the sheet. Same maths, none of the maintenance, and nothing to pay. If the number they give you is fine, you have your answer and you should go back to work.