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MARGIN & COGS ANALYTICSNEW

Margin & COGS Analytics: Your Real Margins, By Product and By Customer, Live

Margin & COGS analytics show your actual gross margin on every product and every customer, calculated from real cost data — what you genuinely paid for the stock that shipped, not a cost estimate from last quarter. You see where you make money and where you quietly lose it, while there’s still time to fix it.

  • Gross margin by product and by customer, from realised costs
  • Cost changes flow through automatically as vendor invoices land
  • Spot loss-making lines and underpriced customers before month end
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★★★★★  Trusted by 600+ suppliers across Australia

Open Pantry Margin & COGS Analytics dashboard showing live gross margin by product and customer, calculated from real cost data
Recommended by:M&J ChickensFood & Drink BusinessFoodService REPGoogle ★★★★★
Built for food & beverage wholesalersMeatSeafoodProduceDairySmallgoodsBakeryBeverages

Most wholesalers are guessing their margins

Margins calculated on last quarter’s costs while this week’s prices moved again

A “good customer” on pricing agreed two years ago — now unprofitable, invisibly

Products selling at a loss discovered at stocktake, or never

Your P&L says one number; nobody can say which products or customers produced it

Real Costs In, Real Margins Out

1

Costs come from reality

Vendor invoices, lot-level stock costs and accepted cost updates feed actual product costs.

2

Sales meet costs

Every order line pairs the price charged with the realised cost of the stock that shipped.

3

Margins compute live

Dashboards show gross margin by product, by customer and over time — consistently, from one ledger of truth.

4

You act early

Reprice the loss-maker, renegotiate the stale deal, feature the high-margin line — in week one, not at month end.

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Margin by product

Every line ranked by what it actually earns. The cucumber that’s secretly negative-margin stops hiding behind the category average.

Open Pantry margin-by-product ranking, exposing a negative-margin line hidden behind the category average

Margin by customer

Distributor research consistently finds a large share of customers are unprofitable once measured properly. See each account’s real gross margin — volume, pricing and mix combined — and negotiate from data.

Open Pantry margin-by-customer view showing each account’s real gross margin from price, mix and cost

Costs that update themselves

When a vendor invoice lands at a new price and you accept the cost update, margins recalculate from that point. Cost drift shows up in your dashboards the week it happens.

A vendor price rise flowing into Open Pantry product costs and recalculating margin the same week

Lot-accurate COGS

With lot tracking on, COGS reflects the actual cost of the specific lot picked — not an average that smears expensive and cheap deliveries together.

Open Pantry COGS using the actual cost of the specific lot picked rather than a blended average
More product lines purchased
24%
Your always-on branded store and app put your full range in front of customers, so baskets grow.
Less order-processing cost
95%
AI order capture and auto-invoicing remove the manual keying between order and books.
Fewer picking errors
80%
Tablet pick & pack with FEFO lot and expiry tracking catches shorts and wrong items before they ship.

Real gains suppliers report after moving ordering, fulfilment and invoicing onto Open Pantry.

Consistent Margin Numbers Across Your Platform

M&J Chickens

Trusted by M&J Chickens

M&J Chickens use Open Pantry to move ordering out of calls and messages and into one digital workflow — giving customers a smooth ordering experience and giving the team fewer errors and less admin.

Alex Ortiz — Head of Sales

“With Open Pantry, we launched our own fully branded ordering app — it’s helped us protect our customer base, move to digital ordering, and deliver a much better experience to our venues.”

Alex Ortiz — Head of Sales
Alex Ortiz — Head of Sales
M&J Chickens
Get a DemoSee how their setup works →

Margin tools are only as honest as their cost data

A BI dashboard bolted onto exported data inherits whatever cost assumptions the export made — usually a static cost field someone updated last quarter. Because Open Pantry runs your purchasing, stock and sales in one platform, the margin maths uses the costs that actually happened. That’s the difference between margin reporting and margin truth.

A BI dashboard on stale exported cost data versus Open Pantry margin computed from the costs that actually happened

Questions Suppliers Ask About Margin & COGS Analytics

How do I calculate gross margin for a wholesale food business?＋
Gross margin = (revenue − cost of goods sold) ÷ revenue × 100. The hard part isn’t the formula — it’s knowing your real COGS when supplier prices move weekly. Open Pantry computes it continuously from the actual costs of the stock that shipped, so the number is current rather than a quarterly estimate.
What’s a good gross margin for a food wholesaler?＋
It varies widely by category — fresh produce and commodity lines run thin, specialty and value-added lines run fatter. More useful than an industry number: knowing your own margin per product and per customer, because the spread inside one wholesaler is usually bigger than the difference between wholesalers.
What’s the difference between markup and margin?＋
Markup is profit as a percentage of cost; margin is profit as a percentage of selling price. A product bought at $10 and sold at $13 has 30% markup but 23% margin. Mixing them up systematically underprices — one of the most common (and expensive) pricing errors in wholesale.
How do I know which customers are actually profitable?＋
Customer-level margin combines each account’s real prices, product mix and the true cost of what they bought. Open Pantry shows gross margin per customer from that data — which reliably surprises: long-standing accounts on legacy pricing are the classic hidden loss-makers.
Should margin use last cost, average cost, or actual lot cost?＋
Actual cost of the stock that shipped is the honest answer, and it’s what Open Pantry uses — realised, ledger-based COGS, lot-accurate where lot tracking is on. Last-cost overstates swings; averages smooth over real drift. Realised cost is what the money actually did.
Does margin data update when my buy prices change?＋
Yes. Accepted cost updates from vendor invoices flow into product costs, and margins from that point reflect the new reality — so a supplier price rise shows up in your dashboards the same week, not at the next spreadsheet rebuild.
Why might my margin report differ from my accountant’s P&L?＋
Your P&L is periodic and whole-of-business — it includes overheads, timing adjustments and accounting policies. Gross margin analytics are operational: product- and customer-level gross margin from realised costs, designed for pricing decisions rather than statutory reporting. They should tell one consistent story; they answer different questions.
Can I see margin by product and by customer at the same time?＋
Yes — dashboards cut margin both ways, and consistently: the same realised-cost ledger drives product lists, customer views and dashboard widgets, so you never get two screens disagreeing about the same number.
How do I spot products losing money before month end?＋
Live margin dashboards rank products by actual margin continuously, and cost-drift alerts flag lines whose costs have risen against their prices — the loss-makers surface themselves instead of waiting for a report.
What should I do about a big customer on prices that no longer cover costs?＋
First, know precisely: their margin by product, and which lines drag it down. Then fix surgically — reprice the worst lines rather than the whole relationship. Data turns an awkward conversation into a specific one; the analytics give you the line-level evidence.
Where does the cost data come from?＋
From your operations: vendor invoices (including accepted price-variance updates), lot-level stock costs, and your purchasing history — the platform’s own records of what you actually paid, not a manually maintained cost field.
Which plan includes margin analytics?＋
Margin and COGS analytics are part of the Pro plan’s inventory and reporting tools — see our pricing page.

Works Even Better With

Purchasing & Auto-POs

Vendor bills and accepted cost updates feed the real costs your margins are built on.

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Lot, Expiry & FEFO

Lot-level costs make COGS reflect the actual lot picked, not a blended average.

Explore →

Customer Pricing & Promotions

See price, margin and profit together before you set or change a price.

Explore →

See Where You Actually Make Money.

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