% Custom Expenses excl. Ad Spend
What it costs to keep the shop open, as a share of sales, with marketing taken out.
What it means
% Custom Expenses excl. Ad Spend is the share of Total Sales taken by the costs you enter in Cost Settings, with every entry marked as Ad Spend removed. Fixed and variable entries both count, as long as they aren't tagged as advertising.
What's left is the running cost of the business: rent, payroll, software, accountancy, warehousing. It's the bill that arrives whether you advertised this month or not, which is exactly why it's worth seeing on its own.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Custom Expenses excl. Ad Spend is your fixed and variable Cost Settings entries added together, minus everything tagged as Ad Spend.
Total Sales is Gross Sales + Shipping + Tax − Discounts − Refunds.
Worked example. A month takes €200,000 of Total Sales. Your entered costs total €30,000, of which €10,000 is tagged as advertising. That leaves €20,000. % Custom Expenses excl. Ad Spend = 20,000 ÷ 200,000 = 10%.
The untrimmed figure, % Custom Expenses% Custom ExpensesHow much of sales your extra costs consume.Under 12% is healthy, reads 15% for the same month. The five-point difference is the advertising you tagged. This column is always at or below that one, and the gap is what you're spending to grow rather than to operate.
It answers the question
Before any marketing, what does it cost to run this shop for every euro it takes? That's the number that has to be covered in a month where you switch the ads off.
Why it matters
Marketing spend can be stopped on a Tuesday afternoon. Rent, payroll and your warehouse contract cannot. Separating the two turns one blended cost figure into a fast question and a slow one, and this is the slow one.
It's also the number that decides how bad a quiet month gets. Nothing here shrinks when sales do, so a 20% drop in revenue pushes this ratio up by a quarter with nobody spending anything extra. That's how a soft quarter becomes a loss while every other margin on the page still looks acceptable.
Read it as a fit test between the size of your cost base and the size of your shop. It rewards growth automatically and punishes a slow month automatically, and neither movement is anyone's fault.
What good looks like
No published bands for this column. The closest published guide is its parent, % Custom Expenses% Custom ExpensesHow much of sales your extra costs consume.Under 12% is healthy, which the app grades healthy under 12% and in need of work over 30% — and since this column is that one minus advertising, it should always sit lower. Treat those bands as a ceiling, not a target.
Beyond that, judge it against your own trend and against the shape of your costs. A mostly variable base — fulfilment charged per order, an accountant on a monthly fee — can run higher here safely, because the bill shrinks when sales do. A mostly fixed base at the same percentage is far more exposed.
The one reading that always means something: this share climbing while the euro amount beside it holds flat. Nothing was overspent. Sales fell underneath a cost base that didn't move, and the fix is on the revenue side of the page.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Check the list is complete first | Confirm payroll, rent and every subscription are actually entered before reading the number | A truthful figure, almost always a higher one | Same week | Net Profit and every margin under it drop the day you finish. The business didn't change; you were reading half a cost base. |
| Fast Cancel what nobody opens | Audit the recurring app and software fees, starting with anything nobody has logged into this quarter | A point or two off, in the month you cancel | 1–2 weeks | A few of those tools quietly hold a flow or a product feed together. One wrong cancellation costs more revenue than the whole audit saved. |
| Slow Re-tender the single biggest line | Take warehousing, fulfilment or your 3PL to two competitors before the renewal date | The largest single move available here | 1 quarter | Switching partners costs weeks of ramp-up, and service dips through the handover — complaints and refunds usually rise before the saving lands. |
| Slow Grow into the cost base | Add sales without adding people, space or tools | Falls with every point of growth, with nothing cancelled | 1–2 quarters | Growth bought with advertising doesn't help this line evenly — the acquisition cost lands in the ad-tagged column instead, so this improves while total profit may not. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
An overhead ratio moves when either half moves, and the two halves need completely different responses.
Growing into your costs
Sales outgrew the running costs. Every point this falls lands on profit without a single thing being cancelled.
Costs growing with the shop
You spent to grow and spent slightly faster than you grew. Fine for a planned quarter; a pattern if it repeats twice.
Trimmed to fit
Costs came down faster than sales did, so the shop stayed in proportion through a quieter month. Controlled rather than comfortable.
Overhead on a shrinking shop
Nothing was overspent — the sales weren't there. Fixed costs don't shrink on their own, which is how one slow month turns into a loss.
The two halves of everything you enter yourself, and they add back up to % Custom Expenses. One is the cost of operating, the other the cost of growing. A shop where the growth half dwarfs the operating half is a very different business from one where it's the reverse, and the blended figure hides which you are.
Contribution Margin is what each sale leaves after its own variable costs; this is what the shop takes off the top regardless. A 30% Contribution Margin against 10% here leaves real profit. The same 30% against 26% leaves almost none, and neither number shows that alone.
Common misreads
A reading that far below the parent metric's 12% healthy line usually means an incomplete list rather than a lean shop. Check payroll and rent are entered before you enjoy it.
Total Sales sit in the denominator. A flat cost list against a slow month pushes this up with no new spending anywhere. Read the euro amount beside it before you go looking.
Past a point a very low reading means you're under-investing in the people and tools the shop needs to grow. The goal is a cost base that fits your size, not the smallest one you can survive on.
Also called
Operating expense ratio · overhead as a share of sales · non-marketing cost share
See yoursYour running costs as a share of sales, beside the ad-tagged share and the full % Custom Expenses figure.
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