Margin walkthroughs, daily-routine playbooks, accounting basics, and the occasional changelog. Short, honest, written by the nouz team — not finance influencers.
A no-jargon walkthrough: revenue minus COGS, minus daily-pro-rated fixed costs. That's it. We promise. Aimed at café, retail, salon and e-commerce owners running on intuition.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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09 May
From bag-of-flour cost to till receipt — exactly how to land on a price that pays for itself, the oven, and the morning shift. Worked example with real numbers from a Berlin bakery on nouz.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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07 May
The median café runs 31,4% food cost. Top quartile sits at 27,1%. Here's where the difference comes from — and the four levers that actually move the number, based on aggregated data from cafés on nouz across twelve European countries.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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05 May
A daily-P&L template for a small business needs nine rows, in this order: gross cash, gross card, tax, transaction fees, COGS, variable costs, fixed-cost slice, EBIT, running monthly total. Below is the template — copy it into Google Sheets or Excel and you have a working daily ledger by lunch.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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04 May
The three mistakes I see in nearly every shop spreadsheet I've ever inherited — mixing gross and net, hiding rent, and never reconciling the till — plus the small habit that fixes all of them.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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01 May
Three asks that came up in 100% of customer calls. They shipped together this month. Here's how they look, why we built them in this order, and the two we got wrong on the first try.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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30 Apr
Chair time × stylist rate + product COGS + overhead slice, then a margin target. Most salons price on instinct and miss two of the four inputs. Worked example with real numbers — and a copy-paste pricing ladder for a four-chair boutique salon.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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29 Apr
Independent retailers restocking every 6,3 days hold a 47,2% gross margin. Those restocking every 14+ days slip to 38,9%. The 8,3-point gap is rarely about pricing — it is the silent cost of stale assortment, dead SKUs and panic reorders, based on 423 retail shops on nouz across nine European countries.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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25 Apr
A café close-out checklist needs to fit on one printed card by the till: count cash, pull the Z-tape, log waste, drop the day's invoices, eyeball EBIT. The nine-line version below is what survived two years of testing across cafés in Vienna, Berlin and Prague.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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22 Apr
Shopify reports show gross sales. EBIT lives three deductions further down. Here's the line-by-line walk from order total to true per-order margin, with a worked example and the seven leak points most stores under-count.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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19 Apr
COGS is a euro number — what it cost to make what you sold today. COGS percentage is that number divided by revenue. The euro tells you what happened; the percentage tells you whether it should have happened that way.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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17 Apr
A retail close-out checklist needs to handle three things a café's doesn't: returns, stock-on-hand sanity, and the gap between SKU-level COGS and what actually sold. Eleven lines, four minutes — printed below in the order we use it.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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14 Apr
The median European e-commerce shop refunds 7,8% of orders. Apparel sits highest at 14,3%, supplements lowest at 2,1%. The sector matters more than the platform — and shops that track the refund line daily lose 3,4 points less than shops that don't, based on 412 e-commerce shops on nouz.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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11 Apr
The "keystone" 2x markup is a relic from department stores in the 1950s. Real owner-operator retail in 2026 runs on a four-layer markup formula that accounts for category turnover, shrink, markdown allowance and target margin. Worked example with a knitwear shop.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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07 Apr
A salon close-out checklist has to do what a café's and a retailer's do, plus the thing nobody warns you about: separate the tip flow from the revenue flow, cleanly, every night. Below: a ten-line card, four minutes at lock-up, written for a 1–4 chair boutique salon.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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03 Apr