Retail Margin Tracker Template
This tracker calculates what you actually keep on each product: selling price less landed cost, adjusted for the discounts you gave and the units that came back. The headline margin on a price list and the margin a product really earns are rarely the same number.
Landed cost is where most retail margins quietly disappear. The purchase price is only part of it — freight, customs, insurance, bank charges on the currency conversion and the cost of getting goods from the warehouse to the shelf all belong in the cost of that unit. A product bought at a 40% markup on invoice price can arrive at well under 30% once the container is paid for, and a cost column that holds only the supplier's figure will never show it.
Discounting is the second leak, and it is invisible in the price list. A category discounted at 15% through a promotion week, with a margin of 35% before, keeps barely half of what the plan assumed. The template calculates margin on the realised price rather than the ticket price, which is the only version that matches what hit the bank.
Markup and margin get used interchangeably and they are not the same: a 50% markup on cost is a 33% margin on price. The sheet shows both for every line precisely because that confusion is expensive — buyers negotiate in markup, the P&L is written in margin, and a pricing rule set in one and reported in the other will be wrong in the same direction every time.
Doing this per product means joining purchase costs, sales and returns across sources, which is why most retailers only see margin at company level and a quarter too late. Finmap brings payments and categories together as they happen, so the per-category picture is available while the stock is still on the shelf.
