How to Know Which Branch Is Making Money and Which Is Draining It

You have two shops. Both are busy. Customers walk in, buy products, pay, and leave. Revenue flows into your account from both locations daily. By all appearances, business is good.

But at the end of the month, your bank balance doesn’t reflect two profitable branches. It reflects something smaller than you expected. And you can’t tell which shop made money and which one ate it.

The problem isn’t that your business is failing. You’re looking at one combined number, total revenue minus total expenses, and calling it profit. That single number hides what’s actually happening at each branch.

Why a combined P&L lies to you

Take a real example. Two branches. Combined numbers for the month:

Looks healthy. NGN250,000 profit on NGN2M revenue. You’d keep going, maybe open a third branch.

Now split it by location:

Branch A is making NGN330,000 profit. Branch B is losing NGN80,000. Your “NGN250,000 profit” is actually Branch A’s strong performance being dragged down by Branch B’s losses. If Branch B didn’t exist, you’d have NGN330,000 in your account instead of NGN250,000.

That’s what a combined P&L hides. One branch subsidizing the other. You won’t see it until you split the numbers.

What a branch P&L actually shows you

A branch-level P&L breaks down the finances for a single location over whatever time period you choose.

It starts with revenue like total sales from that branch, excluding voided transactions. Not what was invoiced. What was actually sold.

Then cost of goods sold (COGS) like the actual purchase cost of the products that branch sold. Not a business-wide average. The specific cost of the specific batches sold at that location, calculated automatically from each sale.

Revenue minus COGS gives you gross profit. Are you selling products at a healthy markup? Branch A at 44% margin and Branch B at 31% tells you immediately that Branch B is either buying at higher prices or selling at lower ones.

After gross profit, you see expenses by category such as rent, salaries, utilities, transport, packaging. Broken out separately. If Branch B’s rent is NGN300,000 and that’s almost half its revenue, that’s a structural problem, not a sales problem.

What’s left after expenses is net profit. The actual money that branch puts in your pocket. Net margin as a percentage tells you the efficiency. Filter by this month, last quarter, last year. Green numbers when healthy, red when not.

Revenue is not profit (and why COGS per branch matters)

Busy and profitable are not the same thing. A branch can bring in strong revenue and still barely break even if the product mix is wrong.

Branch A sells cosmetics with 55-60% margins. For every NGN1,000 in sales, NGN550-600 is gross profit. After expenses, there’s still money left.

Branch B sells household items with 15-20% margins. For every NGN1,000 in sales, only NGN150-200 is gross profit. If that branch has NGN300,000 in monthly expenses, it needs NGN1.5M-2M in revenue just to break even.

Revenue alone tells you how busy a branch is. COGS per branch tells you whether that busyness translates to profit. And COGS needs to be calculated against actual batch costs, the price you actually paid for each product, not a flat average across your entire business.

When you lose track of real product costs, you lose the ability to know which branch is genuinely profitable.

Using branch P&L to make decisions

The P&L isn’t something you look at once and file away. It’s how you make decisions.

Say Branch B has a net margin of 3-5%. You have choices. Negotiate the rent down. Change the product mix ,swap low-margin household items for beauty products with better margins. Or raise prices, especially if you’ve been matching a competitor who has lower overhead than you.

Or say Branch A’s gross margin dropped from 50% to 38% over three months. Your COGS went up. Either your suppliers raised prices or you’ve been selling more of your lower-margin products. Pull up the product-level sales data for that branch and find what’s dragging the margin down.

Both branches showing positive net profit? Good. But if Branch A’s profit is 4x higher, that tells you where to put your next NGN500,000 in inventory. Branch A gets more stock. Branch B gets a conversation.

And if you’re considering a third location, your existing branch data is the benchmark. Branch A runs at 25% net margin. Branch B runs at -11%. That’s your range of outcomes. The P&L data tells you what drives the difference between them.

Who should see this data (and who should not)

Branch-level P&L is a management tool. The owner and the accountant need it. Store staff don’t.

There’s a practical reason for this. Staff who see their branch is underperforming might get demoralized. Worse, they might start making decisions they’re not qualified to make like cutting corners, skipping procedures, or leaving for the other branch because it looks “better.”

Give staff their sales targets and daily performance numbers. Keep the P&L for your own decisions: pricing adjustments, stock rebalancing, staffing changes, where to invest next.

Stop guessing which branch is profitable

If you’re running more than one location and can’t produce a P&L for each one separately, you’re guessing. One branch could be quietly eating the other’s profit, and you wouldn’t know until the combined numbers get bad enough to scare you.

Mayloo generates per-branch P&L reports automatically. Revenue from each location’s sales, COGS from actual batch costs, expenses by category, gross and net margins with health indicators. Filter by any date range. See which branch is carrying the business and which needs attention. Owner-only access keeps financial data where it belongs.

If you’re managing multiple locations, branch P&L is how you know whether expansion is working or just adding complexity. And when you want to compare all branches side by side, the data is already there.

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