Know Your Expense Base

Here's a reminder from Making Money Is Not Illegal, Immoral or Fattening:
"To calculate your Bottom Line Profit, we need to know your Expense Base. This means that for every dollar that goes through your registers, how much of that dollar is used for payroll, occupancy, and all other expenses.
"When we talk about payroll, we are talking about fully burdened payroll, which includes the grand total dollars for the number of hours that your hourly employees work times their respective wages. Then add in the salaries for all of your salaried employees. Now add in the amounts you have to match for any of the employee taxes.
"Occupancy includes rent on the building housing your store. If you own your building, you're still paying yourself rent, taxes, insurance and maintenance on the building. Many people call this 'rent plus triple nets.' This includes common area maintenance or CAM charges. Some retailers will also add all utility costs into this calculation.
"The third component in the Expense Base is other expenses. In our calculations, this does not include principal payback on long-term debt. It does include interest charges. The biggest expense in here for you might be advertising and marketing. The next biggest expense might be bank card charges. That's what you pay for the privilege of using Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and so on. And don't forget travel, interest charges on debt, entertainment, any service contracts you have in the store, and so on. These and the rest of the expenses not already assigned to payroll and occupancy all go into one bucket and you divide that amount by the amount of sales to give you a percentage. Other expenses will cost a retailer about 8% to 12% of their sales."
Details start on page 68 of the book.