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COGS by sector across European SMBs, 2025 data
COGS as a percent of net revenue across European owner-operator shops on nouz in 2025: cafés 31,4%, bakeries 38,7%, retail 47,3%, jewellery 39,8%, e-commerce 41,2%, salons 8,4% (product only). The benchmark to compare yourself to is your sector median, not the cross-sector average — and the within-sector spread is wider than most operators realise.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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08 Feb
Fixed costs vs variable costs for small shops: the difference, with worked examples
Fixed costs are the scheduled payments your shop owes whether you sell anything or not. Variable costs scale with sales and operations. nouz slices both into a daily number so you can see, every evening, whether today actually paid for itself — instead of waiting for the month-end P&L.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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04 Feb
January 2026: the product card got rewritten (and the COGS snapshot got faster)
A smaller release in volume but a bigger one in code — the product card is the most-used screen in nouz after Home, and it had been overdue a serious rewrite.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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31 Jan
The true cost of a discount code: why "20% off" cuts your margin in half
A 20% off code feels generous to the customer and small to the owner. Run the math: on a 40% gross margin item, a 20% discount cuts your gross profit per sale by 50%. To break even on margin you would need to double unit volume — and most promotions deliver 10-25% lift, not 100%. Here is the discount-margin table for cafes, retail, salons, and ecommerce, four worked examples, and the four cases where discounts genuinely make sense.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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30 Jan
The Monday-morning staff numbers meeting: a 10-minute template
A weekly staff numbers meeting template needs to do three things in ten minutes: share last week's EBIT honestly, name the one number to move this week, and end with a single concrete action per person. The agenda below is what works in cafés, salons and small retail; we use it ourselves at nouz.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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28 Jan
The weekend vs. weekday revenue split: European hospitality, mapped
Across European cafés, bakeries and brunch spots on nouz, Saturday and Sunday together produce 38,4% of weekly revenue — meaning the weekend is worth 1,34× a weekday, on average. The spread is wide: residential-area shops skew weekend-heavy (44%), office-area shops weekday-heavy (28%), and the schedule implications of each are the difference between a healthy P&L and a stretched one.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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26 Jan
How to read a profit and loss statement: a 10-minute guide for shop owners
A profit and loss statement is a one-page subtraction story: revenue at the top, profit at the bottom, and seven or eight lines in between that explain where the money went. This guide teaches owner-operators how to read every line, what each number should look like for a small shop, and which ratios actually predict whether next month will be tight or comfortable. The same reading routine that nouz emits every evening, written out long-form.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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22 Jan
The supplier-invoice workflow that doesn't pile up by Friday
A supplier-invoice workflow for a small business needs to hit one rule: every invoice gets entered the day it arrives, in under 60 seconds. The five-step process below works for cafés, retail and salons — and turns the Friday pile of paper into a Friday folder of zero.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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14 Jan
December 2025: a year-in-review release (and what 2026 looks like)
No new features in the December release — instead, a look back at the four things that shipped in 2025 that mattered most, and the four things on the roadmap for the first half of 2026.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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30 Dec
Bundle pricing without bleeding margin: the gift-set maths
A gift bundle reads as a discount to the customer, but priced from the cost stack it can be margin-accretive — fewer transactions, lower packaging cost per unit, shared shipping. Here's the maths that turns a "save 15%" headline into a +6-point margin lift.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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18 Dec
What to do when you miss a day: the back-date workflow without breaking margin
To backdate an expense or revenue entry for a small business: enter it against the date it actually happened, not today. nouz lets you backdate within 30 days; the entry uses the COGS and tax rules that were live on that historical date, so your margin reporting stays accurate. Here's the full workflow.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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12 Dec
Chart of accounts for cafes and retail: the categorization rulebook that decides whether your P&L lies to you
Your chart of accounts is the list of buckets every euro flowing in or out of your business gets sorted into. Get it wrong and the same euro lands in the wrong group, your gross margin reads ten points off, your fixed cost number is half what it should be, and your monthly P&L tells lies you cannot unwind. This is the practical, plain-English guide for owners who want to stop outsourcing the structure to their accountant and never looking at it again.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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08 Dec
The seasonal swing: cafés vs. bakeries, summer vs. winter
Across European cafés on nouz, July revenue runs 1,42× January revenue. Across European bakeries, the swing flips: December runs 1,28× August. The seasonal mirror is the most under-managed dynamic in European small-shop hospitality — and the cash-flow implications, year-on-year, are larger than most operators realise.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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04 Dec
November 2025: fixed-cost lifecycle dates (start, end, mid-cycle changes)
The biggest model change of the year — fixed costs now have start dates, end dates, and a clean way to handle a mid-cycle rent increase without lying to your historical P&L.
Ibrahim Ölmez
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26 Nov