Every business loses profit somewhere. It might be a customer who costs more to serve than they pay you. It might be a pricing strategy that hasn't changed in three years while your costs have gone up every single one of them.

We start by looking at your numbers with fresh eyes. We analyse your profit and loss statement to identify where financial performance is being held back, then check your gross profit, profit margins, direct costs and indirect costs. We look at your profit margins by product, service and customer, not just one number for the whole business. Healthy profit margins in one part of the business can hide weak profit margins in another, and both affect your business profits at the end of the year. From there, we show you, in plain English, exactly where your business profits are leaking away and what to do about it, so your profits stop leaking away for good.

Part of our job is identifying opportunities you can't easily see from inside the business. Once you can see it, you can fix it. That's the whole point of our profit improvement service, and it's why so many of our clients tell us they finally feel in control of their numbers.

We don't just glance at your year-end accounts and hand you a report full of jargon. We dig into the parts of your business that actually move the bottom line, and we build a profit improvement plan around what we find. To maximise profitability, we usually look at some combination of the following:

• Gross margin and profit margin improvement, including pricing reviews and cost of goods sold analysis
• Customer profitability and product profitability, so you know which customers, products or services are worth more of your time
• Overhead reduction, supplier cost analysis and professional fees reviews
• Faster debtor collection, credit control and reducing how long customers take to pay you
• Profit forecasting, scenario planning and simple "what if" modelling you can update yourself
• Tax-efficient profit extraction, including director remuneration, dividends and income tax planning
• Financial KPI development, so your key performance indicators actually mean something

Every business is different, so we don't run through every item on this checklist for every project. We focus on the two or three areas that will do the most to maximise profitability for your business, then build out a plan from there.

We Look At Your Margins, Pricing And Most Profitable Customers

We run a full customer profitability review, so you know exactly who your most profitable customers are, and who is quietly costing you money. We also look at product and service line profitability, so you can see which products or services deserve more of your focus and which ones don't.

From there, we look at your pricing strategies. We test different pricing strategies before you commit to anything company-wide. Cost-cutting strategies, customer strategies, and pricing strategies all play a part, depending on your business.

Small, well-planned price increases, alongside a look at average order value and cross-selling to your existing customer base, often do more for your bottom line than chasing a wave of new customers through expensive customer acquisition ever could. A small shift in revenue mix, serving more of your best customers and fewer of your worst, often beats chasing raw revenue growth. Identifying opportunities for increasing revenue from customers you already have is usually faster and cheaper than finding brand new ones, and it's one of the simplest ways of boosting profitability we know. Driving profitability across every part of the business, not just the top line, is the real goal.

We Break Down Your Costs, Efficiency And Cash

We break down your direct costs and indirect costs, so you know what's actually driving your business costs up. We identify the costs that don't need to be there and the customers who are quietly costing you money. We also check your cost of goods sold against sector averages, not just against last year. We look at supplier spend, staff utilisation and any low-value tasks that are quietly draining your time and your team's time, alongside a review of professional fees and subscriptions many businesses forget they're still paying for.

We look at operations first, because that's usually where the easiest wins are. Better operational efficiency often creates more profit than a price rise ever could, and we look for operational efficiency gains before recommending anything drastic. We also look at operational efficiency across your day-to-day business operations, your supply chain and your stock, because reducing waste and lowering costs has a direct effect on gross profit without you having to sell a single extra thing. Streamlining operations often costs nothing and adds straight to the bottom line.

Reduce costs in the wrong place, and you can damage the business. Reduce costs in the right place, guided by good financial data and a clear plan, and you protect it and improve efficiency at the same time. Protecting profit margins matters just as much as cutting costs, because profits are what's left after your costs are paid.

We Build Forecasting Tools And Financial Insight You Can Use

We build simple forecasting tools and monthly management accounts so you always know your current performance against plan. This gives you the financial insight to make more informed decisions instead of guessing, and it means you stop finding out about a problem three months after it started. The faster we identify a problem, the cheaper it is to fix.

We also use key performance indicators that mean something to your business, not generic ones copied from a textbook, so you can track your financial performance and your profitability month by month.

One-off profit improvement projects with a UK accountant typically run somewhere between £750 and £2,500, depending on how much of the business needs reviewing. Ongoing monthly support, including management accounts and regular financial insight, tends to sit between £400 and £900 a month, and ad hoc advisory work is often billed at £80 to £200 an hour.

This is a rough guide, not a fixed quote, and your actual cost will depend on the size of your business, the state of your accounts and how much support you want month to month. We'll always give you a clear, fixed price before any work begins, so you can spend money on this with confidence rather than guesswork.