Put in one month of shop sales and costs. Get a real profit figure, not a guess. Category-wise margin, the full cost stack including what your card machine quietly takes, and break-even. Updated July 2026.
Six sheets in all, including an Instructions sheet that explains both GST treatments before you type anything. Built to sit alongside your existing stock and pricing work, not repeat it. If stock accuracy is the weak link, start with the inventory mistakes retail stores make.
Your shop details, plus two dropdowns that change the arithmetic everywhere else: Regular or Composition, which decides how net sales and cost of goods are treated, and your turnover band, which sets the RBI cap on debit-card charges.
A row per category or department. Enter what you billed, the GST rate and what the stock cost. You get net sales, gross profit, margin percentage and each category's share, so you can see which shelf earns and which just takes up space.
Rent, salaries, power, packaging, marketing, shrinkage and the rest, split into fixed and variable so break-even actually works. Nothing hidden in a single lump called 'expenses'.
A block on the same Operating Costs sheet. Enter what share of sales comes through cash, UPI, RuPay debit, other debit, credit cards and wallets. It applies zero to the statutory-free rails and the RBI cap to the rest, then shows what your payment mix costs you every month.
Gross sales down to net profit, with gross margin, net margin, GMROI, stock turn, sales per sq ft, sales per employee, contribution margin, break-even sales and margin of safety. Nothing to type on this sheet.
A complete worked month for a 900 sq ft general store on Rs 11,08,500 of billing, every number visible, so you know what a finished workbook should look like before you touch your own.
Petpooja Invoice bills with the right GST rate, tracks sales by category, and values your stock as it moves, so the three numbers this template asks you to dig out are already sitting in a report each month.
Explore Petpooja InvoiceMost shop owners know their monthly billing figure by heart. Very few could tell you, within ten thousand rupees, what the shop actually made.
The gap is not laziness. It is that three or four ordinary-looking mistakes each move the answer by more than the profit itself.
The first is treating GST as sales. On the regular scheme, the tax on your bill was never yours. On Rs 11,08,500 of billing, roughly Rs 1,08,500 belongs to the government.
Count that as revenue and every margin you calculate is flattering and wrong. The free GST calculator strips it out either way in a second.
The second mistake is the mirror of it. A regular-scheme retailer claims input credit on purchase GST, so that tax must not sit inside cost of goods. A composition dealer cannot claim it, so for them it must.
Same shop, same stock, two different cost figures, and the gap is the whole GST rate. This template asks which scheme you are on and applies the right treatment everywhere.
The third is the one almost nobody costs at all: what it takes to get paid. In India this is not a flat fee.
UPI paid from a bank account and RuPay debit carry zero merchant discount rate by statute, under Section 10A of the Payment and Settlement Systems Act, 2007 and Section 269SU of the Income-tax Act, 1961.
Other debit cards are capped by RBI at 0.40 per cent up to Rs 20 lakh turnover and 0.90 per cent above it. Credit cards are not capped at all.
Two shops with identical sales can take home different money purely because of how their customers pay.
The fourth is stopping at gross margin, which is not profit. It is what is left before rent, salaries, power, packaging and shrinkage.
In the worked month inside this template a shop turns Rs 1,95,600 of gross profit into Rs 22,752 of net profit. The difference is entirely the cost stack.
If you are still doing this on paper, our comparison of manual billing versus POS software for Indian retail covers where the numbers usually go missing.
This workbook holds all four straight at once, then gives you the ratios a retailer is actually judged on: gross and net margin, GMROI, stock turn, sales per square foot and sales per employee.
It also gives you the break-even number that tells you how bad a month can get before you are losing money.
It does not tell you what a good margin looks like. No reliable Indian SME benchmark exists, and a made-up one is worse than none. It shows you your own numbers, month after month.
A 900 sq ft general store in Ahmedabad, four staff, regular GST scheme, turnover above Rs 20 lakh, the sort of shop covered in our guide to POS software for grocery stores in India. Every figure below is on the Example sheet, and the live sheets recompute it from your own numbers. Pricing per product is a separate job, handled by our product pricing calculator.
The merchant discount rate on UPI paid from a bank account, and on RuPay debit cards. Not a bank offer, a statutory prohibition in force since 1 January 2020. Every rupee collected on these rails reaches you whole.
Source: Section 10A, Payment and Settlement Systems Act 2007; Section 269SU, Income-tax Act 1961 read with Rule 119AAThe RBI ceiling on other debit cards if your turnover is above Rs 20 lakh, capped at Rs 1,000 a transaction. Up to Rs 20 lakh it is 0.40%, capped at Rs 200. Credit cards are not capped at all, which is why the template asks for your rate instead of assuming one.
Source: RBI circular RBI/2017-18/105, DPSS.CO.PD No. 1633/02.14.003/2017-18 dated 06-Dec-2017The composition rate for traders, on turnover, with no input tax credit and no GST collected from customers. It looks cheaper than the regular scheme and changes your margin arithmetic completely. The template has a switch for it.
Source: CBIC composition scheme provisions; limit Rs 1.5 crore, Rs 75 lakh in special category statesOn the regular scheme the tax on your bill belongs to the government, not to you. Net sales are gross divided by one plus the rate. Skip that and every margin on the page is overstated, on a Rs 11 lakh month by more than a lakh.
A regular-scheme retailer claims input credit on the GST paid to suppliers, so it is not a cost and must not sit in cost of goods. A composition dealer cannot claim it, so for them it must. Getting this backwards moves gross margin by the entire GST rate.
Card and wallet charges rarely appear in a home-made P&L at all, because they are deducted before the money lands and never look like a bill. They are still a cost. Read your merchant statement, not your bank balance.
It does not. UPI from a bank account and RuPay debit are free by law. Other debit cards are capped by RBI. Credit cards and wallets are neither free nor capped. A shop where customers swipe credit pays every month for the same sale.
Damage, expiry, theft and counting errors never appear on any invoice, so they never make it into the spreadsheet. They still leave the shop. Our note on inventory mistakes retail stores make covers where the stock actually goes.
Gross margin is what is left before rent, salaries, power and packaging. In the worked month it is Rs 1,95,600 and the shop keeps Rs 22,752. Owners who track only gross margin get a nasty surprise from their accountant.
Most owners cannot say what they need to sell in a month to cover costs, which makes every slow week feel like a crisis or a shrug. It is one division: fixed costs divided by contribution margin. Keeping the daily numbers straight is far easier with a daily sales report you actually fill in.
If your billing is still manual, our guide to the best billing software for a retail shop in India is the other half of this problem.
| What you are measuring | By guesswork | With this template |
|---|---|---|
| What you call sales | The figure on the bill book | Net of GST, because the tax was never yours |
| Cost of goods | One lump for 'purchases' | Category by category, with purchase GST treated per your scheme |
| Margin view | One number for the whole shop | Per category, so you can see which shelf earns |
| Payment charges | Not counted, deducted before you see it | Costed by mode, with the statutory-free rails at zero |
| Shrinkage | Noticed at stock-take, never costed | A line in variable costs, every month |
| Profit | Gross margin, mistaken for profit | Net profit, after fixed and variable costs |
| Break-even | Never worked out | Calculated, with margin of safety alongside |
| Stock efficiency | A feeling about what is moving | GMROI and stock turn against your own average stock |
Download the free template and run one month. Most owners find the answer differs from what they assumed.
Petpooja is India's leading SME business software suite, trusted by 1,50,000+ businesses across restaurants, retail, healthcare, manufacturing, and more. From billing and payroll to task management and procurement Petpooja helps Indian businesses run better, every day.
Petpooja Invoice bills at the right GST rate, reports sales by category, and values stock as it moves, so your monthly margin is a report rather than an evening's typing.
