Today was a number crunching day.  It’s rainy outside, kinda cold, and not really inspiring me to do more than eat sugar-free chocolate bars and flavored decaf Krups coffee.  (Although I did clean up my fish tank and now have soggy sleeves, still, two hours later!)

But back to number crunching… I love love love Excel! I use it all the time at work –  for KPI calculations, budget tracking, gap analysis, general sorting, whatnot. But it has profoundly leaked into my personal life as well. Not only do I use it for my monthly budget tracking but at one point I was a Farmville Freak and I used it religiously for calculating which crops had the best ROI. (I know I’m not the only one out there doing that!!!)

Fast forward a few years…  I’m sporting a tablet and Microsoft Office has become a pipe dream that has me spinning in conundrums about installation & cost. I’ve since discovered it’s a completely unnecessary headache to ponder since Google Sheet is happily raising to the occasion.

A Healthy ROI

When I started this venture, I was really only interested in one thing: ROI.  Was my Return worthy of my Investment. For the first month I was able to achieve a pretty healthy ROI of about 40%.  That meant my Total Sales  divided by my Total Expenses (or Investment) was over 40%.  This is a fantastic number that was quickly short-lived. Alas it was Flax’s amazing, incredible, unbelievable sale that did me in.

When I realized that Flax had a $1 per decorative paper sheet for their moving sale, vs the usually $5 sheets, and that there was only a limited time to capitalize on this, I did go a bit cuckoo. I think I ended up spending about $300 there. That’s 300 sheets of paper that would normally would have cost $1,500… so yeah… I bought ALOT of paper.  But this $300 absolutely whacked my ROI ratio down to 30%. And then I started stocking up on Scents, and Labeling supplies. Currently my ROI is down around 26%. Not bad but…

COGS

Ignoring my growing inventory of supplies (which is hard to do since the husband reminds me how I’ve taken over the living room), I’ve decided to start calculating my actual profit, aka Net Profit. This means Total Sales less Total COGS (Cost of Goods Sold).  So that took me on another adventure.  I’ve been chasing down receipts to find out how much the 25 yard ribbon cost me so I can determining the unit cost for 1 foot. And the unit cost for each paper circle that goes into the flowers. And the per inch cost of the floral wire, the floral tape, scent drops…  Surprisingly there are conversions for how many drops make up a fluid ounce. If you’re curious they range from 456 to 591 drops per fl oz, so I’m calculating at 500. So my $5 – 1 oz floral essences are costing me 1 penny per drop.

Eventually I’m going to have to guestimate how much material went into the 4 product types I’ve made so far. But it gets worse,  I’m going to need to start keeping track going forth, while in progress, as I’m completing each steps. Oye! What? I can’t zone out anymore?  I have gotten better at taking pictures after each step, so I’ll try to add inventory tracking to that pause. Lucky me!

This effort has also made me aware of what purchases have the best value. I was ecstatic when I bought for my $1.50 Daiso ribbon,  vs my $6 Fantastic ribbon. And then I found out that at 3 meters vs 10 yards, the Daiso ribbon costs $0.15 to the Fantastico $0.23 per foot. But then another ribbon from Fantastico that was $4 for 25 yards, blew them both away at $0.05 per foot. So yeah, that ‘aha’ moment happened.

And then another side-track occurred. As I was researching; trying to determine if shipping supplies qualified as COGS or not, I kept running into answers from QuickBook forums.  I am probably not likely to invest in QuickBooks, but it did make me start thinking about the ‘big picture’ which had me start labeling my expenses as either COGS or Operating Expenses.  And of course I had to create an Income Statement in my Google Sheets that auto grabs the various sums by their labels using the SUMIF function.  (Fancy, right?)

Thus far I’m happy to see I am still in the black. Now that most of my materials for the year have been purchase, my balance should only get better. Right?