Custom Expenses
Every cost you enter yourself — rent, payroll, software, agency fees.
What it means
Custom Expenses is the euro total of the costs you enter by hand on Cost Settings for the period, in two kinds: fixed amounts that repeat, and variable ones that scale with sales. Entries tagged as ad spend are included alongside the rest. Nothing arrives here automatically, so anything nobody typed in is missing from the total.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Fixed Custom Expenses are the amounts that repeat whatever the month does: rent, salaries, software, insurance.
Variable Custom Expenses move with sales — an agency on a percentage, a per-order pick fee, a marketplace commission.
Worked example. Fixed: €3,000 rent, €14,000 payroll, €900 of software = €17,900. Variable: an agency on 2% of €120,000 of sales = €2,400. Custom Expenses = €20,300 for the period.
Now imagine only the software was ever entered. The same month reads €900, and every profit line beneath it is €19,400 too high — quietly, consistently, and in every export you send anyone.
It answers the question
What does the shop cost to run before a single order arrives? Everything the platform can't see for itself — the landlord, the payroll, the tools, the agency — sits in this one line.
Why it matters
It's the only cost you control completely, and the only one that can be silently wrong. Ads, payment fees and product costs arrive from connected data; this arrives from someone remembering to type it in, which makes an incomplete list a common reason a shop thinks it's more profitable than it is.
Fixed entries also hold steady through a slow month. A flat expense list against falling sales pushes % Custom Expenses% Custom ExpensesHow much of sales your extra costs consume.Under 12% is healthy up without anyone spending an extra euro.
What good looks like
There's no standard euro amount — it depends on your team, your tools and whether you hold your own stock. Two checks work: is the list complete enough that you'd sign it off as your real running costs, and is it growing more slowly than Total Sales? For something you can compare period to period regardless of size, read % Custom Expenses% Custom ExpensesHow much of sales your extra costs consume.Under 12% is healthy, which does have a healthy band.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Audit the recurring software line | List every subscription in the fixed entries and cancel what nobody opened last month | Custom Expenses down 5–15% | 1–2 weeks | Some apps quietly hold a flow, a feed or a review widget together. One wrong cancellation costs more revenue than the whole audit saves. |
| Fast Move a flat retainer onto a percentage | Swap a fixed agency fee for a share of sales so the cost moves with the month | Costs fall in slow months instead of holding steady | 1 month | Strong months get more expensive, and across a growing year the percentage can total more than the retainer would have. |
| Slow Re-tender your single biggest line | Take warehousing, fulfilment or the agency to two competitors before the renewal date | 10–20% off the largest number in the list | 1 quarter | Switching a fulfilment or agency partner costs weeks of ramp-up, and service dips through the handover — refunds and complaints tend to rise first. |
| Slow Grow into the base you already pay for | Add sales without adding headcount, warehouse space or tools | The euro total holds flat while sales rise | 1–2 quarters | Running a bigger shop on the same team burns people out. The saving shows up months before the recruitment bill does. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
Overhead is only a problem relative to the sales carrying it. Read the two together or you can't tell which half moved.
More sales on a smaller base
Costs fell while the shop grew, and every euro of that gap lands on Net Profit. It's also the shape a forgotten entry produces, so check both.
Overhead growing with the shop
Some rise is fair: more sales usually need more people and more tools. It's only a problem when the costs grow faster than the sales paying for them.
Cut back with the month
Costs came down alongside a quieter month. Deliberate trimming and a missing entry look identical here — find out which one it was.
Fixed costs on a shrinking shop
The bills grew while the revenue paying them fell. This corner turns into a loss faster than any other, because none of it shrinks on its own.
The euro total says what you spend; the share says whether the shop can carry it. Spending €5,000 more is fine if sales grew enough that the percentage fell, and a warning if it rose. Neither figure settles that alone.
These move one for one — a euro added here is a euro off the bottom line, with nothing in between. The pair also catches the accuracy problem: a Net Profit that looks too good next to a short expense list usually means the list is short.
Common misreads
Only the ones someone entered. There's no default list, so anything never typed on Cost Settings is missing from every profit line beneath it.
It holds both kinds. Variable entries scale with sales and some are tagged as ad spend, so a rise here doesn't always mean a new bill — it can just mean a bigger month.
Editing or backdating an existing entry does it too, and that reshapes past periods as well as this one. Check the expense list before you go looking for a new supplier.
Also called
Operating expenses · OPEX · overheads · running costs
See yoursYour Custom Expenses for the period, split into the fixed and variable entries behind the total.
Open Shopify Profit →