Margin & mix
A what-if on the same invented numbers: push volume on one product and watch the top line and the bottom line move in different directions.
Most sales dashboards stop at the top line. This one carries the cost of each product line as well, so a decision can be read twice: once as sales, once as profit. The two readings often disagree, and when they do, the second one is the one that matters.
The model is a single ratio, stated below rather than hidden in the code. Cost per carton does not move when you run a promotion, so every point of price you give away comes straight out of gross profit. Whether the extra volume puts more back than the discount took is the whole question — and the answer depends on the product, not on the size of the push.
The push
Choose a product and a volume push. Each point of volume is bought with 0.35 points of price.
The rule: +1% volume costs −0.35% price. A push helps only while a product’s margin is wider than the price it gives away — 35 points here. Below that line every extra carton sells at a loss against the base.
The headline
Top line, bottom line
Change against the base period, side by side. When these two point in different directions, read the second one.
Product mix
Every product line after the push. The pushed line is marked; the change column is its gross profit against the base.
| Product | Cartons | Revenue | Gross profit | Margin | Mix | Change |
|---|
How this page is built
The decisions worth stating, as on the sales page.
- One ratio, on the page. The whole promotion model is the sentence under the slider. Anyone can check it, argue with it, or change it. A what-if whose assumptions live only in the code is an opinion with a user interface.
- Same facts as the sales page. The ten product lines here are the ones that page is drawn from; at zero push, revenue equals its net sales value to the cent. The generator refuses to write either data file unless the two agree, and this page checks itself against its own file on load.
- Same definition of growth. The verdict sentence, the tiles and the bars all ask one function, with the same dead band as the sales page, so “growth” means one thing on both.
- The answer flips by product on purpose. Try the lowest-margin line and the highest. One push, two verdicts.
- The bars floor at ten percent of scale, so a one-point move is a sliver and not a full-width bar dressed up as drama.
- The slider stays live in the executive view. The sales demo hides its controls there; this page keeps its one control, because the question it asks is the page.
The page weighs almost nothing, loads one font file from this domain, and calls no third party. It needs JavaScript to exist at all — every figure here is computed, not stored — so without it the controls stay hidden rather than sit there dead, and you get the words above and nothing pretending to be a number.