Measuring Client Profitability and Costs
BoundarylessJed
Member Posts: 17 ✭✭
Hello Wave Team, this is a feature request for measuring Client Profitability and Costs. Currently, there is an Income by Customer report. This is limited in its usefulness because while a certain customer might bring in a large amount of revenue, it may also cost just as much or more to service that client, and there is no way to measure how profitable that customer is. For an example, as part of servicing a client, I have expenses or cost of goods sold that are specific to that customer's account. In other words, those costs are not part of general overhead for my business, and they are not shared with any other customer.
It would be very helpful to allocate these types of costs to a specific customer so that I can measure the profit and loss for each client. This is a very helpful metric for determining which clients are profitable and how to adjust service for each client. I envision this working as follows:
Expenses and COGS would continue to show as is in the system. However, there is an additional option for receipts, bills, and transactions that enables me to tag a specific customer. Then, a profit and lost by customer report could be built and generated. This report would show the revenue the customer produced, with any discounts, for a total income figure. Then the costs of goods sold tagged for the customer would be listed, generating the Gross Profit for Customer. The report would also subtract other expenses specific to that customer, resulting in a final Net Profit for Customer figure. This is a key metric that I need to determine the health of each customer account and would help in key decisions regarding each customer.
It would be great if there is a summary report very similar to the current Income by Customer report that includes a couple of these additional metrics (like Gross Profit, and Net Profit for each customer) in one view to easily compare clients on one page. From there, I could click on a customer's report to see the full detailed Profit and Loss Statement for that specific Customer.
This is a key missing feature in my opinion, something that Quick books and other accounting systems have, and something I need as my business grows. But I don't like the other systems and prefer to stay with Wave, so I hope this is something you can develop.
Does this make sense? Happy to answer questions. Thanks!
Comments
I agree completely. I migrated from Sage to Wave and this is a feature I am really missing. Iy could be as simple as allowing us to create tags that can be assigned to every transaction for a customer so that the a P&L for that tag (customer or project or event) can be generated. Please help with this feature. For those of us who manufacture items in batches, these tags could help us group costs for each batch
Yes @FOA , I can see how this could be even more helpful in a manufacturing business, even more than in a service business like my own. I'd like to get the Wave team to note this request and put something in their development queue. It's really quite painful to do that calculations outside of Wave, when it could be so simple if some tagging feature was developed.
Hi @BoundarylessJed , thanks for this detailed feature idea on how you'd like to see this function represented in Wave. Also thank you @FOA for adding your voice to this.
I can't speak on whether or not this will be added to our short term roadmap in the near future but I would be more than happy to ensure that our Product team receives this thread as feedback on what some of our users are looking for.
If anyone else would like to add their voice, please do so!
Yes, second this! Right now I have to manually add up the COGS for each client to see profitability by client account.
By all means, the ability to filter the P&L by customer is a top need for business measurement. With application of the customer to each expense already being available, at a minimum I can see revenue and direct expenses, which is a good starting point. That is, if I could filter by customer.
Even better if I could do this by "project" which does not currently exist as a subcategory, but I'd be pleased to see just by customer for now.
I really hope this gets prioritized, as it will mean the difference between staying with Wave or finding an alternative. And I like so much about Wave currently!
Is there anything in the works on this feature request?
Hi @BoundarylessJed , thanks for following up on this! For full transparency, there is no ETA available for when this may be released and I'm currently unable to speak to whether this will be added to our short term product roadmap. In the meantime, thank you for sharing your feature idea here and feel free to let us know more about how this feature would be useful for you!