A single company-wide margin hides which parts of your business make money and which are carried. Here's how to see the truth.
A blended gross margin — one number for the whole company — feels like clarity, but it hides more than it shows. It can't tell you whether a product line is profitable, whether a location is carrying the rest, or whether a new service is worth the time it takes.
Margin by line changes that. When you break margin out by product, service, or location, patterns appear: the offering everyone loves that barely breaks even, the quiet line that funds the business, the hire whose desk isn't paying for itself yet.
This is core controller work. It requires clean books first — you can't split margin you haven't categorized correctly — and then the analysis layer that turns categorized numbers into a decision you can act on.