Blog

Vaccine Roll-out Slightly Behind Schedule

With more than 41,500 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine administered to date and 95% of all border and Managed Isolation and Quarantine workers having received at least their first jab, NZ’s vaccine roll-out is slightly behind schedule.

However, the Director-General of Health Dr. Ashley Bloomfield said they’re ramping up every day with additional sites coming online across the country.  A total of 1,300 vaccinators have completed training and they expect nearly 50 vaccination clinics to be up and running by March 30.

PM Puts Quarantine-Free Travel With Australia On Hold

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced earlier this week that quarantine-free travel with Australia will be on hold for two more weeks despite pressures from businesses to open the country’s border to Australia.

The government hopes to open up to Australians on the 6th April 2021, provided there is a proper system in place to prevent more lockdowns.

Free Online Digital Training and Support Tool

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise, in partnership with The Mind Lab and Indigo, has launched a free training and support services to help businesses develop their digital capabilities.

More than 9100 small businesses are already taking advantage of these solutions through DigitalBoost.co.nz.  This includes providing support on cybersecurity and fraud prevention.

Meanwhile, if you want more focused software integration advice, you may also get in touch with us so we can assist you in getting the right tech in place.

Understanding Contribution Margin and Why You Need It

When you run a business, you obviously need to know how profitable it is.  You can check your profit margin to understand by how much your revenue exceeds costs.

However, if you’d like to dig deeper and learn how a certain product contributes to your profit, you have to look at the contribution margin.

When you create a product or deliver a service and deduct the variable cost of offering it, the leftover revenue becomes the contribution margin.

So simply put,

Contribution margin= revenue – variable costs

By knowing the contribution margins, you can decide whether to add or subtract a product line, how to price it, and how to structure sales commissions.

If a product’s contribution margin is negative, it means your company is losing money producing it.

Your course of action could be to discontinue the product or increase its price.  Meanwhile, if a product has a positive contribution margin, you would want to keep it.

However, the first step in calculating for the contribution margin is to use your income statement and identify all your fixed and variable costs.  This is not as straightforward as it sounds because it’s not always clear which ones fall into each category.

So if you want to save time and ensure that you get the contribution margins right, get in touch with us so we can help you make informed business decisions.

Get in touch

Contact us if you have any questions or want to discuss the next steps for your business.