GROSS. — free commercial calculators for UK FMCG brand teams

The Wait

Margin is an opinion; cash is a fact. When the retailer actually pays you, when you pay your supplier, and the gap your bank account has to survive.

Margin is an opinion; cash is a fact. When the money actually moves — and the gap your bank account has to survive.

The workings

Profit is an opinion formed at invoice; cash is what your bank balance says while you wait. UK grocery standard terms run 30 to 90 days from invoice, and your supplier usually wants paying sooner than that. The gap between those two dates, multiplied by your weekly sales, is working capital you are lending to the listing.

This page phases the same weekly plan as The Listing — the stores, the promo calendar, the period, the investment — into cash: NSV arrives when the customer actually pays; the goods bill leaves when you actually pay it; the customer investment instalments leave in their quarters. Change the plan on The Listing and the cash curve here follows. The running line at the right is your exposure, and its lowest point is the funding the listing needs — the number to take to whoever funds you, before they find it themselves.

The shelf fill is the one-off that catches brands out: to go live you ship enough stock to fill every store — cases per store times stores — and you buy and invoice all of it in week one. It front-loads both sides of the cash line, and on long payment terms the goods leave your account weeks before the fill sells through. Model it here before it is a surprise.

Growth makes this worse, not better. Every extra store is more cash out today against more cash in two months from now. Brands do not usually die of bad margins; they die of good margins with long terms.

The other calculators

• Home — Free commercial calculators for UK FMCG brand teams. Retailer margins, gross-to-net, trade spend payback, supp
• The Shelf — Your range, defined once. Enter each product’s cost price, RSP, units per case and rate of sale — every calcul
• The P&L — See what the retailer really makes on you. Reads top-down: shelf price, VAT, who takes what, and what you actu
• The Waterfall — Every deduction between the shelf price and your bank. Gross to net net, with promo funding, back margin and o
• The Floor — The lowest cost price, or the RRP, that still clears your target margin. Solved backwards from the number you
• The Listing — Model the range review before the buyer does. Week by week, with a full promo calendar behind the annual GSV-t
• The Payback — How much incremental volume a promo needs to pay itself back. Break-even in cases, and the uplift that implies
• The Stock Answer — What to order, and when, before you run out. A weekly supply plan that follows your promo calendar, in whole c
• The Amazon Cut — What FBA takes before you see a penny. Every fee per unit, plus a full-year GSV-to-net P&L by cases sold.
• The TikTok Cut — What TikTok Shop takes on every sale. Every fee per unit, plus a full-year GSV-to-net P&L by cases sold.
• The Line-Up — The same product across grocery, Amazon and TikTok, side by side. The biggest channel is rarely the one that p
• The Range — The whole portfolio on one till roll. Blended margin, the SKU that carries the range, and the full-year plan.
• The Ledger — One email a month on the commercial maths of UK FMCG. No selling. The archive lives here.
• The Ledger No. 001 — Your margin is your insurance. The minimum margin that survives a halved rate of sale, worked in full.
• The Guides — The long reads behind the calculators: retailer margin, gross-to-net, FBA fees and margin benchmarks, written
• How retailer margin actually works — Front margin, back margin, margin vs mark-up and the wholesaler layer — with the arithmetic shown.
• Gross-to-net: where your revenue goes — GSV, NSV, promo funding and back margin — the waterfall between invoice and bank, and what a healthy one looks
• Amazon FBA fees in the UK — Referral, fulfilment, storage and the plan, added up honestly — plus the break-even price nobody checks.
• FMCG margin benchmarks — Indicative UK brand gross-margin ranges by category, measured on the right base and honest about being ranges.
• Payment terms in UK grocery — Sixty days is not a detail — it is working capital, and it is yours. The debtor-day maths, the shelf-fill trap
• What a promotion actually costs — Funding off invoice, the uplift with the widest error bars in the building, and the payback test nobody runs.
• The Rate Card — Every default in GROSS., what it is, when it was checked and where it comes from. The maths is only as good as

Free, no sign-up. The maths is checked; the defaults are dated and sourced on The Rate Card. VAT number: not applicable. This is a website.