Free calculator
How much of the month could disappear before it stops paying for itself, expressed in the three units an operator actually feels: orders, euros and days of trading.
Share of the month you could lose
30,2%
33Break-even orders
493
to cover everything
Orders this month
706
at the current pace
Days of cushion
9,4
at that pace
What each order and each month costs
↑ ↓ to nudge, Shift for ten. Commas or dots both work.
This is the number to hold a risky decision against. A new hire, a bigger ad budget or a rent increase all shrink the cushion by their own size, and a store running under about a tenth of a month of safety has no room for an ordinary bad week.
213 orders and €18.105,00 of net revenue above break-even: about 9,4 days of trading could disappear before the month stopped paying for itself.
An estimate from flat rates. In nouz every order is priced from the costs of its own day.
A margin of safety calculator measures the distance between what your store sells and what it needs to break even. It reports the cushion three ways: the orders you could lose, the net revenue that represents, and the days of trading it would take to use it up.
The formula
Two stores can both be profitable and be in completely different positions. One clears its costs on the tenth of the month; the other clears them on the twenty-eighth. The second is one bad week from a loss, and no profit figure on its own will say so.
The cushion does. It is the share of today’s orders that could vanish before the month stopped covering everything, and converting it into days of trading turns an abstract ratio into something you can picture: a delayed shipment, a broken checkout over a long weekend, a supplier failing to deliver.
It is also the right frame for any new commitment. A hire, a rent increase or a bigger ad budget each shrink the cushion by a knowable number of orders, and the decision becomes whether what remains still survives an ordinary bad month.
Where it goes wrong
A safety margin is only as honest as the costs underneath it, and these four all inflate it.
The cushion exists for the bad months, so compare it with your worst recent one rather than your typical one. A 20% cushion in a business whose weakest month runs 30% under average is not a cushion at all, it is a scheduled loss.
Every fixed cost left out of the block makes the cushion look larger: the annual insurance, the accountant, the app subscriptions, the salary you do not pay yourself yet. A cushion built on a partial cost list is arithmetic about a different company.
A committed monthly budget is fixed in every way that matters: it will be spent whether or not the orders arrive. Treating it as variable removes it from the block and can double the apparent cushion of a store that is spending heavily.
The cushion moves with every price change, supplier increase and new subscription. It is a monthly reading, not a founding fact, and the useful version is the one you can watch trending in the wrong direction before it matters.
Worked example
The calculator’s defaults: €60.000 of net revenue across a €85 average order, goods at 38%, €6,40 of fulfilment and 1,9% of payment fees per order, €15.000 of ad budget and €7.000 of fixed costs over 31 days.
Each order contributes €44,68 after its own variable costs, and the block to cover is €22.000, so the month needs 493 orders and is doing 706.
A cushion of 213 orders on 706 is a margin of safety around 30%, which at this pace is roughly nine days of trading. The store could lose the best part of a week and a half and still cover everything it committed to.
That is also the frame for the next decision: a €2.000 monthly hire consumes about 45 orders of the cushion, leaving the store covered for an ordinary bad week but not for two.
In the app
A calculator works from flat rates you type once. nouz prices every single order from the cost rules that were in force on that order's own date, and rebuilds the same statement every night from your own orders and your own ad spend.
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Each one is a different question about the same statement. All 32 are free, and none of them asks you to sign up.
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The long version
Want the long version rather than the arithmetic?
Break-evenday 22of the month12 min readIs my Shopify store profitable? The three-check auditThree checks decide it: does your best seller pay, does the month clear its fixed costs, and does the trend hold? The audit, with real numbers at every step.Is my Shopify store profitablenouz tracks the month against its own break-even from real orders and real costs, so the day the cushion starts shrinking is a thing you notice rather than a thing you reconstruct later.