Break-Even Point

Your break-even point is the level of sales at which total revenue exactly covers total costs, the moment you stop losing money but have not yet made any. Below it you burn cash; above it every extra sale starts generating profit. You find it by dividing your fixed costs by the contribution margin of each sale (the price of one sale minus what that one sale costs you to deliver).

For a founder, break-even turns the vague goal of "become profitable" into a concrete number: how many customers, units or euros of revenue you need each month. That number guides pricing, hiring and how hard you can spend on growth.

Say you're running your books in Moneybird and it shows 6,000 EUR of fixed monthly costs, with each subscription billing 60 EUR and costing you 20 EUR to serve. Your contribution margin is 40 EUR, so break-even is 150 customers. Cross that line and customer 151 is pure profit.

It also exposes the real price of every fixed expense. Hire a salesperson, watch your pipeline target in Pipedrive jump, because that salary lifts break-even and you now need more deals just to stand still. Pin the number on a Looker Studio dashboard and you can see, every day, exactly how far above or below the line you're trading, which keeps a lean business honest about what it can actually afford.