Maintain the minimum balance in your bank accounts.Monitor how much money you spend on utilities each month, which will reveal areas of waste and motivate your organization to be more energy efficient. Use less electricity and water whenever possible, and opt for a cheaper internet or phone plan that still meets your company’s needs as a business. Search for ways to lower your utility bills.This often includes cutting back on large fixed costs, but it can also entail streamlining variable costs. One way to increase your business’s profitability is to find ways to reduce operational costs. You can set different bonus structures for employees depending on your business’s needs, which will affect your fixed and variable expenses. Thus, the employee’s total pay is a mixed expense. The base salary for this employee is fixed, but the commission they earn on each sale is variable, as the commission amount depends on the number of sales made. Together, they make a mixed expense.Īnother example would be if you have a salesperson working on commission. You’ll pay the fixed $100 no matter what, but the extra $20 is variable. Let’s say you’re paying $100 for web hosting each month, but one month you exceed your bandwidth limit and are hit with an extra $20 fee. Here are some common examples of fixed expenses:Ī third category of expenses is a mixture of fixed and variable. Whether you sell one phone case or a million, these costs remain the same. However, these costs are fixed in the sense that they don’t change based on your production volume. Rents go up, salaries increase and insurance premiums tend to rise. Indeed, your fixed costs may even increase over time. These are the expenses you can’t reduce regardless of how much business you’re doing. Here are some more examples of variable expenses:įixed costs are what most people refer to as overhead costs. Shaving the costs that go into selling each product makes a huge difference in your bottom line. It’s critical to understand your total variable expenses from the start to see where you can potentially save money. While the packaging cost per case remains the same, the total cost of packaging rises when production is higher.
Below is a chart explaining how those variable expenses would work. In other words, your sales volume directly impacts your variable expenses.įor example, let’s say you sell phone cases. Variable expensesĪ variable expense is a cost that changes depending on your production level. As prices for equipment and supplies rise, you’ll want to protect your business against inflation. Variable costs are typically part of the cost of goods sold (COGS), although fixed costs can be included in COGS as well. Variable expenses are often volume-related, such as the amount of time your hourly employees work each week.
Variable expenses, however, may increase or decrease based on your output because you’ll need to buy more raw goods and spend more on hourly labor in order to produce more output. For example, you have to make the same office lease payment every month regardless of how much work you do in that office.
#Fixed versus flexible expenses worksheet software
Below, get examples of each type and find out how your business can save on both.Įditor’s note: Need accounting software for your business? Fill out the below questionnaire to have our vendor partners contact you with free information. Understanding the difference between the two gives you a clearer picture of not just where your money is going but also how each expense impacts your company. Every business has operating expenses - that is, the costs of running the business - and they usually take two forms: fixed expenses and variable expenses.
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