Fixed Costs
costs/fixed-costs.md

Fixed Costs

How to set up recurring fixed costs like rent, salaries, and software subscriptions.

Tip: If you’ve connected the MCP server, you can paste bank statements or expense reports into Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to create the fixed costs for you.

What Are Fixed Costs

Fixed costs are recurring expenses that aren’t tied to individual orders — things like rent, salaries, and software subscriptions. Unlike variable costs, they don’t change based on how many orders you process.

Adding fixed costs to Kleio gives you a complete picture of your profitability, not just your per-order margin.

How Fixed Costs Appear in the P&L

Fixed costs are spread evenly across the actual number of days in each interval and shown in the P&L. For a monthly cost, that means the amount is divided by 31 in months with 31 days, 30 in months with 30 days, and 28 or 29 in February. For example, $3,000 of monthly rent allocates to $96.77/day in January (31 days), $107.14/day in February in a non-leap year (28 days), and $100.00/day in April (30 days).

Creating a Fixed Cost

Navigate to Costs → Fixed Costs and click Add Fixed Cost. Each fixed cost has the following fields:

  • Name — A label for the cost (e.g., “Office Rent”, “Shopify Subscription”).
  • Allocate to — Either Fixed Costs (default) or Ad Spend (Other Marketing). See Adding custom marketing costs below.
  • Amount — The cost amount per interval.
  • Interval — How often the cost recurs: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
  • Channel — Whether it applies to online, POS, or both.
  • Currency — The currency of the cost.
  • Start Date — When the cost begins.
  • End Date — Optional. Leave empty for ongoing costs.

Adding custom marketing costs

When creating a fixed cost, you can set Allocate to to Ad Spend (Other Marketing) instead of Fixed Costs. The cost will then flow into Ad Spend in the P&L and reporting, rather than into Fixed Costs.

Use this for:

  • Marketing platforms we don’t integrate with yet — any paid channel where the spend isn’t pulled in automatically.
  • Offline marketing costs — print, billboards, influencer flat fees, sponsorships, events, etc.

This keeps your marketing spend (and therefore your blended ROAS and contribution margin) accurate, even when the spend doesn’t come from a connected ad platform.

How detailed do I need to be?

If you don’t already know your overhead as a % of revenue, input everything — salaries, software, rent, etc. Aim for annual accuracy, not daily perfection.

If your fixed costs are stable, you can skip them entirely and use margin as your key metric instead. Movement in margin will reliably reflect real performance changes without needing to model overhead.