ClickUp
Profit First ClickUp Calculator | using formula fields in ClickUp for finances
September 15, 2023
If you’ve been following DaSilva Life for a while, you already know that we use ClickUp for so much more than just project management. If you’re new here, now you know!
The capability of this tool allows us to expand our business organization to virtually anything, like:
Another one of the amazing extensions of ClickUp is the ability to manage your business’ profitability. Specifically, determining how much of your revenue should go towards every aspect of your business, like salaries and operating expenses.
At DaSilva Life, we do this through a system called Profit First, created by Mike Michalowicz. For years now, we’ve followed this system to a tee and even created a ClickUp template where we manage our profitability. It’s truly one of our favorite templates to date.
Now, we’re excited to share this philosophy and brand-new ClickUp template with you!
Watch the video below, where we walk you through the principles of Profit First and how to use this template! If you can’t watch now, keep reading to learn more!
As we mentioned above, Profit First is a system or method that takes your business income and calculates where all of that money should be allocated, including how much. If you haven’t read the book, we highly suggest it. It’s been a total game changer for our business, and we want the same for you!
For most business owners, managing finances and profitability can be scary and overwhelming. After all, we’re business owners, not accountants. (Unless, of course, you are an accountant, in which case you can ignore that last part.)
This method helps create a system that’s clear, simple, and repeatable, so you always know exactly where your money is going – and how much needs to go there.
For example, say you’re looking at your business bank account and see a balance of $10,000. Most of us would see that number and think, ‘Hey! I have $10,000 dollars to spend!’ But when you’re running a business, that’s not entirely true.
That’s because out of that $10,000, we should be setting money aside to:
So, after all of that, we don’t really have $10,000 to spend.
With the Profit First method, you don’t have to play a guessing game with your finances anymore. Using Profit First, and our handy template, you’ll be able to automatically calculate how much of that $10,000 needs to go toward each part of your business budget. This way, you don’t have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck, not making payroll, or running out of money should any unexpected costs come up.
The Profit First method also helps you create a system that’s simple and manageable. You don’t have to spend hours upon hours adding and subtracting and playing with numbers. Once your system is set up, it literally takes minutes to calculate.
The basic premise of the Profit First method is that your business should have at least five main accounts:
You can also create other custom categories for your business if your profits go towards other things. For example, DaSilva Life allocates a percentage of our profits towards donations and savings, so we have those additional categories set aside for us.
Once your categories are established, it’s time to calculate what percentage of your profit should go toward those categories. This is entirely up to you – just make sure that all of your percentages equal 100%. If you need a starting place, here’s what DaSilva Life’s allocations look like:
Total allocation: 100%
We also have a ‘Savings’ category of 6% that comes from the ‘Owner’s pay’ category.
To put the Profit First system in motion, you’ll enter your business income twice a month: on the 10th and 25th of every month. Then, with our ClickUp Profit First Calculator Template (more on that below!), you’ll automatically see how much of your business income is allocated to each category. From there, you’ll transfer that amount into the respective bank account.
….and that’s it!
See how easy that is?!
Now that you know what the Profit First system is and how to use it, it’s time to bring it all to life with our Profit First Calculator template for ClickUp!
Our template is already organized by quarter to make it easier to navigate. Within each quarter, we have already created monthly categories with two tasks under each (one for the 10th and the 25th).
The template also has all of the accounts/categories created within the custom fields, so you don’t have to build them yourself! (Note: If you don’t want or need the ‘extra’ categories, feel free to hide, delete, or edit them!) Each formula is also already created for each category but will take a little bit of finessing and customizing on your end, which brings us to our first step!
When you first upload the Profit First Calculator template, you’ll see a lot of formula errors. Don’t panic! This happens because you can’t directly template formula fields since it brings in unknown variables, which are custom fields based on our ClickUp instead of yours.
Thankfully, correcting the formula errors is easy! All you have to do is:
…and ta-da! Your errors should be fixed!
Now that the formulas are corrected, it’s time to add your allocations to each formula. What we’re doing here is multiplying your income by each percentage to calculate the final allocation, which looks like:
[INCOME] x [PERCENTAGE] = ALLOCATION
So, if we take the same categories we looked at above, we need to convert those to percentages to calculate the allocations.
Once you determine your percentages (don’t forget they should equal 100%!), it’s time to add them to the formula within each custom field in the template.
Once all of your formulas are updated, all that’s left is to start adding your income twice a month within the tasks! When that is added, everything will be calculated automatically. How amazing is that?
If you ever need or want to change your allocation percentages, you don’t have to manually update them every time. For example, say in Q2, you want to up your profit from 2% to 5%. All you have to do is:
Don’t forget to make adjustments elsewhere so your total percentages still equal 100%.
Look at you go! Now that you have the template, your allocations, and formulas, you can calculate your profitability within minutes!
If you’re already a Systems School member who has purchased our ClickUp Template Vault, you’ll see this new addition in your dashboard!
If you’re not in the vault, join us! When you do, you’ll get access to this template and 40+ other ClickUp templates, in addition to:
