What is allocated OpEx?

Allocated OpEx is the share of a month's operating expenses — rent, salaries, software, advertising — that the app assigns to one order, and from there to the products on it. Subtract it from contribution margin and you get net profit per order and per product. Add it up over every order of a month and, together with the OpEx that had no order to land on, you get the month's operating expenses in the P&L.

Formula

allocated OpEx (order) = Σ over buckets:
    bucket amount × order's basis value ÷ month's basis total
net profit = contribution margin − allocated OpEx

Each expense allocates by its own basis: revenue share (the default), order count, unit count, or contribution-margin share. Advertising always allocates by revenue share, and only within its own sales scope: own-store ad spend lands on own-store orders, marketplace ad spend on marketplace orders. An expense scoped to one store view lands only on that store view's orders.

Worked example

September has €3,000 of rent (revenue share) and 1,000 orders. An order worth €150 out of €60,000 of September revenue carries €7.50 of rent. Its two lines — €100 and €50 — carry €5.00 and €2.50. If the lamp on the €100 line made €38 of contribution margin, its net profit on that order is €33.

How Saldo Metrics computes it

Operating expenses accrue daily: a monthly expense costs its amount divided by the days of the calendar month for every day it runs, so an expense that starts on the 20th counts eleven days of a 30-day month, and the month in progress holds what has accrued up to today. Each month is then split over that month's booked orders — the same population the P&L uses, so a fully refunded order still carries its share — and each order's share over its lines by revenue. Rounding is done so that a month's allocations add up to the month's expenses to the cent.

OpEx that has nowhere to land is never smeared onto other orders. A month with expenses but no orders, a store-view expense for a store with no orders that month, or Amazon ad spend without the Amazon order connector all show as unallocated OpEx next to the net-profit totals, and stay in the P&L.

The figures are kept in a rollup that updates within minutes of any change to orders, costs or expenses; the page shows when it was last computed.

Why it matters

Contribution margin answers "does this product pay for itself?". Allocated OpEx answers "after the fixed costs, which products carry the business?". The two lead to different decisions: dropping a product removes its contribution margin but not its allocated OpEx — the rent is still due — so a product with a positive margin and negative net profit is usually worth keeping.

Common mistakes

  • Cutting products on net profit alone. Allocated OpEx is a fixed cost spread by rule; it does not go away with the product. Decide on contribution margin, read net profit for context.
  • Comparing with the margin widgets. Net profit is built on the P&L basis (fully refunded orders included); the margin widgets use net sales only, so a product with refunds shows a different margin in each.
  • Ignoring unallocated OpEx. Net-profit totals plus unallocated OpEx equal the P&L; the totals alone do not.

Where you see this in the app

The Profitability page and the "Net profit by product" dashboard widget.