Calculate profit or loss amount and percentage for your business transactions. Perfect for traders, retailers, and business owners
Enter cost and selling prices to calculate profit or loss
Our profit and loss calculator helps businesses, traders, and individuals quickly determine the profitability of transactions. Whether you're running a retail store, trading stocks, selling products online, or managing any business, understanding your profit margins is crucial for financial success and informed decision-making.
To use the calculator, simply enter the cost price (the amount you paid to acquire or produce the product) and the selling price (the amount you sold or plan to sell the product for). Click Calculate, and the tool instantly shows whether you made a profit or loss, the exact amount, and the percentage. This information helps you evaluate pricing strategies, compare product performance, and make data-driven business decisions.
The calculator is invaluable for setting competitive prices, analyzing historical sales, negotiating deals, calculating margins for bulk orders, and understanding the financial impact of discounts or markups. It's also useful for students learning business concepts and anyone wanting to understand the profitability of personal transactions like selling used items.
Understanding profit and loss calculations is fundamental to business operations. Here are the essential formulas:
Example: Cost Price = ₹500, Selling Price = ₹650
Profit = 650 - 500 = ₹150
Profit % = (150 ÷ 500) × 100 = 30%
Example: Cost Price = ₹800, Selling Price = ₹650
Loss = 800 - 650 = ₹150
Loss % = (150 ÷ 800) × 100 = 18.75%
These calculations help you understand your margins and make informed pricing decisions. Remember that profit percentage is always calculated on the cost price, not the selling price, which is the standard business practice.
Profit and loss calculations are essential across various business scenarios:
Retail Business: Calculate margins on individual products, determine optimal pricing strategies, analyze the impact of discounts, and identify your most profitable items. Understanding profit percentages helps you decide which products to promote and which to discontinue.
Trading and Investing: Evaluate the profitability of stock trades, cryptocurrency transactions, or commodity trading. Calculate returns on investments and compare performance across different assets to optimize your portfolio.
E-commerce: Factor in product costs, shipping, platform fees, and other expenses as your cost price. Compare profit margins across different products and marketplaces to focus on the most profitable channels and products.
Wholesale Business: Calculate bulk order profitability, negotiate better deals with suppliers, and determine minimum order quantities that maintain acceptable profit margins. Understanding loss scenarios helps set price floors.
Service Business: Use cost price as your total service delivery cost (labor, materials, overheads) and selling price as your service fee to ensure profitable operations and competitive pricing.
Profit margin is calculated on selling price: (Profit ÷ Selling Price) × 100. Markup is calculated on cost price: (Profit ÷ Cost Price) × 100. This calculator shows markup (standard profit percentage). A 30% markup means 30% profit on cost, which equals approximately 23% profit margin.
Good profit margins vary by industry. Retail typically aims for 20-40% markup, wholesale 10-25%, luxury goods 60-100%, and services 15-50%. Research your specific industry benchmarks and consider your business model, market position, and operational costs when setting target margins.
Include all costs in your cost price: product cost, shipping, packaging, storage, platform fees, marketing costs, and overheads. This gives true profit. Many businesses separate gross profit (sales minus product cost) from net profit (gross profit minus operating expenses).
Selling at a loss can be strategic for clearing obsolete inventory, generating cash flow, making space for new products, or matching competitor pricing temporarily. Calculate the total loss and compare it with the cost of holding inventory longer, potential obsolescence, and storage costs.
Increase profits by: 1) Reducing cost price through better supplier negotiations or bulk buying, 2) Increasing selling price through value addition or premium positioning, 3) Reducing waste and operational inefficiencies, 4) Focusing on higher-margin products, or 5) Increasing sales volume to spread fixed costs.