Know the moment your margin starts slipping, not at year end
There is no such thing as a "good" margin number you can set once and monitor against. 20% is healthy for a distributor and would be fatal for an agency. So CFO Pal doesn't ask you to guess one. Instead it compares your last three complete months of gross margin against the three before that, and alerts you only when the fall is real and material enough to matter.
A trend, never a number you have to invent
There is no target-margin field anywhere to fill in and get wrong. CFO Pal watches the direction of travel (the last three complete months against the three before) and only flags a fall that is material, not a rounding wobble.
Built from your own ruling, not a guess
On the Account Mapping screen, you mark which expense accounts are direct costs and which are overheads. CFO Pal calculates your margin only from what you have actually ruled. It never infers this from account names, because a guess dressed up as a fact is worse than admitting the business hasn't said yet.
Silent until you've ruled every cost
If even one expense account that moved money hasn't been classified, CFO Pal states nothing rather than compute a margin around a gap. Unconfigured is a different state from broken, and it is shown as one.
Ignores noise
The comparison only runs once the earlier months have brought in enough revenue for a genuine reading, so a slow month or a very new business doesn't produce a wild, meaningless swing.
How margins erode without anyone noticing
A supplier's small annual price rise, a discount given to close one big deal, a subcontractor rate that crept up. None of these show up as a single dramatic cost. They show up as your margin being a little lower this quarter than last, and by the time it is obvious on the year-end accounts, it has already cost the business real money for months.
How you get alerted
Once every expense account you actually use has been ruled on the Account Mapping screen, a genuine margin decline surfaces automatically, in your dashboard, and by whatever channels you've chosen in Settings.
Know your margins. Every month.
CFO Pal calculates and tracks your gross margin automatically. Get alerted the day it starts slipping.
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