Benta is not kita: pricing and knowing your real profit

“Ubos benta!” feels like success. Then the end of the month comes and there's no money, and it's hard to say where it went. The usual reason is that benta (sales) got confused with kita (profit). Sales are what customers pay you; profit is what's left after every cost, including the ones you don't notice. A business with high sales and no profit is just hard work that pays the suppliers.

Benta, gastos, kita

Keep three numbers in your head. Benta is the total customers paid. Gastos is everything it took to make those sales: stock, ingredients, packaging, delivery, rent, electricity, fees, and the salary you pay yourself. Kita is benta minus gastos. Only kita is yours. If you can't say the three numbers for last month, you don't yet know whether the business is working, no matter how busy it looks.

Count every cost, not just the puhunan

Most sellers price from the puhunan alone: “Bili ko ₱50, benta ko ₱70, kita ₱20.” But the real cost of that sale includes more.

• Direct costs: the product or ingredients, packaging, cups, bags, labels.
• Delivery and platform fees: a 20% to 30% commission on food-delivery and marketplace apps, courier fees, and e-wallet or card charges.
• Overhead: rent, electricity, water, gas, internet, a share of your phone load, and licenses.
• Your time: the hours you spend buying, preparing, selling and delivering. If you'd earn ₱100 an hour somewhere else, that's a cost.
• Waste and losses: spoiled food, unsold stock, items given away, utang from customers who never paid.

Example: a milk tea sells for ₱90. Ingredients are ₱28, the cup, lid and straw ₱7, and a fair share of rent, gas and electricity adds ₱12. Sold through a delivery app with a 25% commission, another ₱22 goes to the app. The real profit is ₱21, not ₱62. Sell 100 cups and you earned ₱2,100, not ₱6,200.

Price from cost, then check the market

Start from the full cost per unit, add the profit you need, and only then look at what competitors charge. If the market price is lower than your cost plus a fair profit, you have three honest options: cut costs, change the product, or don't sell it. What doesn't work is pricing low to 'get customers first' with no plan to raise it; a price that loses money on every sale just loses more money when sales grow.

For services and freelancing, price your time the same way. Add up what you need to earn in a month, your tools and internet, taxes and your own SSS and PhilHealth, then divide by the hours you can actually bill (not every hour you're awake). That's your minimum hourly or per-project rate.

Margin and markup are not the same

Markup is profit as a share of cost; margin is profit as a share of price. A ₱50 item sold at ₱70 has a 40% markup (₱20 ÷ ₱50) but only a 29% margin (₱20 ÷ ₱70). Agents and apps talk in margin, suppliers talk in markup, and mixing them up leads to prices that look fine and aren't. When a platform takes a 25% commission, it takes 25% of the price, which can wipe out a 30% markup completely.

The 'ubos benta' trap

Selling out is only good news when the price was right. Sold-out and no money usually means one of three things: the price was below the real cost, the sales money went to personal spending, or the profit sits in stock, receivables and utang instead of cash. Check which one before you buy more stock. A smaller batch at the right price beats a big batch at a loss.

How to do it in Iponista

1. Log every sale as income under Business or Freelance / Raket into your business wallet, and every cost, including fees and your own salary, as expenses from it.
2. Create categories for your main costs (Stock, Packaging, Delivery & fees, Rent & utilities) so Statistics shows your real gastos split.
3. At the end of each month, compare Business income with the business wallet's expenses in Statistics: that gap is your kita.

Remember this

Benta is what customers pay; kita is what's left after every cost, including fees and your own time. Price from full cost, know your margin, and treat 'ubos benta' as a question, not a celebration.

Do this today

Take your best-selling item and write down its full cost per unit, including packaging, fees and a share of overhead. Then compute the real profit per sale.