One store, six businesses
The store-wide margin percentage answers no useful question, because it moves whenever the mix moves, not when performance does. A week heavy on cigarette cartons drags it down while the store did nothing worse; a hot stretch at the coffee machine flatters it. The unit of management is the category, and the POS departments, if the books are built on them, produce a category profit line every week.
| Category | Margin character | What we watch |
|---|---|---|
| Tobacco & vape | High ticket, thin margin | Cash tied up per delivery, shrink in dollars, stamp compliance |
| Lottery | Commission only, no inventory risk | Commission trend, counter time, booked net |
| Snacks, drinks & candy | The strongest shelf margins | Facings, price points, supplier deals |
| Basic groceries | Zero-rated traffic drivers | Date-driven spoilage, basket attach |
| Coffee & food service | Highest margin per dollar | Waste, morning labour |
| Beer & wine | New since September 2024 | Licence terms, wholesale cost, pricing rules |
With that table live, pricing, ordering and shelf-space decisions stop being arguments. The shelf that earns gets the facings; the one that only generates traffic gets managed for exactly that.
Tobacco and vape: regulated inventory, real money
Tobacco behaves like no other SKU in the building. It arrives from registered wholesalers with Ontario tobacco tax already inside the cost, so a routine delivery is a four-figure cash event for goods that will earn single-digit margin. Vaping stock has carried federal excise duty since 2022, with Ontario's matching coordinated duty added in July 2024, all of it excise-stamped before it reaches your shelf. Display rules limit what merchandising can do, which means this category is managed almost entirely through cost, order cadence and loss control.
That is CFO work, not bookkeeping. How many days of cartons should sit behind the counter, given that they are the most stealable dollars in the store? Does the wholesaler's volume break justify the extra cash tied up? We put numbers on those questions instead of habits.
Shrink is a number, not a feeling
Shrink is the gap between what the books say you should hold and what a count finds, and it only becomes manageable when it is measured by category on a cycle. Storewide shrink of one kind of product is theft; of another, it is dated dairy nobody rotated; at the till, it shows up as cash over/short instead. Each cause has a different fix, which is why one blended number leads nowhere.
We set the count cadence, calculate shrink by department as a percentage of that department's sales, and put the trend beside cash over/short on the same page. When the tobacco line moves, you look at cameras and key control. When bakery moves, you look at ordering. The point is to know which conversation to have.
The weekly flash and the monthly close
A store runs on a weekly rhythm of deliveries, payroll and deposits, so the reporting matches it: sales and margin by category, shrink and over/short, labour hours against sales, and the HST and OLG positions building through the month. Labour deserves its own line because it is the one big cost the owner controls week to week; hours against sales by daypart shows whether the second body on a Tuesday afternoon earns its wage, and whether the owner's unpaid hours are hiding the store's true profit. That number matters the day you want a manager, a valuation or a bank's attention. The monthly close then confirms rather than surprises. All of it stands on department-level books; if those do not exist yet, our End-to-End Accounting engagement builds them, and the Fractional CFO layer reads them with you on a set schedule.
Financing the next move
The decisions get bigger than the weekly flash: a second location across Mississauga, a lease renewal with a rent step, buying your unit instead of renting it, or taking over a competitor's store with its licences. Walla Assaf spent years in banking and corporate finance before founding Tauro, which shows in how we package a store for a lender: category-level statements, normalized owner pay, a cash-flow forecast the branch can test. Business Financing Advisory handles the lender file, and where the bank wants CPA-prepared statements, a compilation engagement covers it. Scope and fee come in writing after a free 15-minute discovery call.
