clerk $950 per month and budgets $650 per month for utilities, taxes and so forth. This means her operating expenses (all fixed costs) are $2,400 per month. (Her costs seem low because some parts of New York State are behind the inflation curve.) Therefore, Ronnie has to sell $4,800 of records per month to break-even. Her salary comes out of the money she takes in over the $4,800. Fortunately, it will cost Ronnie very little in extra overhead to sell up to $10,000 of records per month, so if she can achieve this volume, she will get to keep close to half of it.     a. How to Calculate Your Profit     Perhaps youre lucky enough that your break-even sales forecast shows youll make more than you need to break even. If so, you can easily calculate your profit. Simply multiply your projected sales revenue that is over the break-even point (, above) by your average gross profit percentage (Section F3, above).     Example: Deborah needs $140,000 to break even in her bookkeeping business. Her projected sales revenue shows that she will be bringing in $185,000 the first year-or $45,000 more than she needs to break even. To determine the profit, she multiplies her average gross profit percentage (0.692) by $45,000. Her profit will be $31,140.     b. If Your Forecast Shows a Loss b. If Your Forecast Shows a Loss     What will you do if your break-even sales forecast shows that youll lose money? First of all, dont panic. Youll need to do some sober, serious and meticulous thinking. Carefully check all your numbers and double-check your arithmetic. Incidentally, many people doing this exercise for the first time make some simple mistake in arithmetic that throws off the whole forecast. You might have someone with good math skills review your work.     Lets look at Antoinettes situation and see how her figures have turned out.             Break-Even Sales Revenue Forecast     A B C     Fixed costs per year month or year Average gross profit percentage expressed as a decimal Breakeven sales revenue   (A divided by B)     $192,600 0.382 $504,188