Many businesses struggle because they run out of cash long before they generate enough profit to cover their cash requirements. The break-even analysis is essential because the break-even point helps you know the number of sales required to cover all expenses and generate no profit. This way, you’ll prevent your business from experiencing slow or negative growth that you have little control over cash and profit levels.
But with a break-even analysis, taking control is possible. The break-even analysis helps your business identify the point where revenues equal costs, and when this occurs, the business has achieved its goal of breaking even.
This guide will take you through how using the break-even analysis will be beneficial to your business to achieve success.
What’s Break-Even Analysis?
Break-even analysis refers to calculating and evaluating an entity’s margin of safety based on collected revenues and related costs. You can determine the best pricing for your products or services to make a profit or at least cover your total costs.
You need to know how to calculate break-even point because this knowledge will help you determine how many products or services you’ll need to sell to avoid making a loss. Therefore, you can better understand which sales opportunities to pursue to make the most efficient use of your time and resources.
What Are The Benefits Of Break-Even Analysis?
There are several benefits linked with break-even analysis, and these include:
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1. Help You Set Revenue Targets
As an entrepreneur, you must have a particular revenue target that guides you on the set goals you need to achieve within a certain timeline. This allows you to compute by helping you determine the sales target that you need to attain. With a precisely set revenue goal in mind, you’ll be able to figure out the appropriate quantity and timeframe to achieve your goals.
2. Determine Best Pricing For Your Products
The break-even point is crucial for your business plan because it helps you determine the best pricing for your products to make a profit. It can also help you determine whether or not it’s worth producing a product at all. With this in mind, you can determine the lowest price for which you should sell your product to cover the production cost and make a profit.
The break-even analysis also helps you assess whether or not your business model can withstand changes such as an increase in rent or a shift in labor costs. This is crucial because such costs later directly affect the pricing of your goods and services.
In addition, break-even analysis can help you decide whether or not to add a new product or service to your business. And should you choose to do so, the break-even analysis enables you to determine the best pricing.
3. Mitigate Business Risk
In business, many factors determine if a company will be profitable or not due to the many unexpected risks that lie ahead. The break-even analysis comes in handy during such times as you can use it to estimate the viability of a new venture and determine if you’ll make a profit or incur a loss. Therefore, you’ll be well-informed on whether to proceed with a particular product line or investment by gauging its profitability.
Therefore, break-even is excellent for managing business risk. This is vital considering the many decisions made each day and all which come attached to a certain degree of risk. Some risks include setting a new price or deciding on a target market. As a result, it’s essential to be completely informed about all the risks involved before making any particular decision.
4. It Helps You Get Much-Needed Funding
Many startups often struggle with financing, hence resort to drawing up a business plan issued to interested investors. The break-even analysis is one component you must include in your business plan, enabling you to show your investors that their investment will be profitable.
If you think like an investor and highlight the value of break-even analysis, you may find yourself with an influx of cash in your bank account. It’s a helpful tool that clearly outlines both cost-volume-profit and cash flow analysis. Therefore, the investors get enough data to convince them why they should trust you and go ahead with the investment.
5. Better Decision-Making
In business, you should always look to make rational and informed decisions. But this for many entrepreneurs can be a challenge, especially when pursuing something that you’re passionately devoted to and want to ensure its success. This is where break-even analysis plays a vital role in your business by removing any emotion when making crucial business decisions.
Break-even analysis can be applied to various scenarios such as planning production, preventing unnecessary inventory, analyzing market share, and building a business for better profitability. And by using it, you’ll be able to predict the outcome of any business decision and make informed decisions accordingly.
6. Figure Out Missing Expenses
Have you been curious about where all the money was going? Almost every startup owner has this problem when running their business. Even after carefully examining your finances thoroughly, this might happen only to realize that you aren’t aware of all your expenses. And nobody likes missing expenses because the anxiety that comes from not knowing where you’re headed can be a little hard to handle.
Luckily, break-even analysis helps you avoid such a situation by always giving you an easy way to gain clarity on all your business expenses. Besides giving you peace of mind, this helps you reach the point of a sustainable business model and gives you confidence about your future plans for expansion or a pivot. With proper monitoring of your expenses, you’ll be able to determine whether or not your business is profitable.
Takeaway
Running a startup can be stressful, especially when you have no clue if your business will make any money or not. This is why break-even analysis is one of the best ways you can figure out if you’re going to be successful or not.
If you’re still not convinced, this article explains how the break-even analysis might help your startup succeed.
