The 10 calculators every small business owner runs the math on weekly.
Pricing, payroll, and back-of-the-envelope profitability — the math you need to do this morning, not 'when the bookkeeper sends the report.' Free and embeddable on your site.
- • Price products and services with real margin math instead of 'cost plus 20%' guesses that quietly bleed out by quarter four.
- • Calculate paychecks, overtime, and sales tax on the fly — useful when you're the bookkeeper, the HR department, and the GM all at once.
- • Embed the margin or sales-tax calculator on your customer-facing site so prospects, vendors, and your own team have a self-serve answer to the 'how much will this be' question.
Margin Calculator
Cost, price, and gross profit — the single most important relationship in any small business. The difference between knowing your margin to the dollar and 'I think it's around 30%' is the difference between a business and a hobby.
10 more calculators every small business owner should bookmark.
Click any calculator to use the full version — formulas, examples, FAQs, and the option to embed it on your own site.
Break-Even Calculator
Units required to cover fixed costs at given price and variable cost. The conversation behind every pricing change and every new product launch.
Open calculatorRevenue Calculator
Forecast revenue from price × quantity × frequency. Useful for budget planning and for stress-testing 'what if we lost our top customer.'
Open calculatorCost Per Unit Calculator
Total cost ÷ units produced — the math behind every 'should I buy in bulk' decision.
Open calculatorSales Tax Calculator
Quick state and local sales tax math for invoices, contractor payments, and customer quotes. Faster than opening QuickBooks.
Open calculatorSalary Calculator
Convert between hourly, weekly, biweekly, monthly, annual — useful for paying yourself and benchmarking employee comp.
Open calculatorPaycheck Calculator
Net take-home after federal, state, and FICA. The number you need when an employee asks why their direct deposit is what it is.
Open calculatorOvertime Calculator
Time-and-a-half math at any hourly rate. Useful for retail, restaurant, and service businesses with variable schedules.
Open calculatorLoan Calculator
Equipment financing, SBA loan, line of credit — payment math for any term and rate.
Open calculatorCompound Interest Calculator
What retained earnings reinvested at a market return would do over 10 years — the framing for the 'should I take a distribution or reinvest' conversation.
Open calculatorDiscount Calculator
Final price after % off — for promo planning, vendor negotiation, and the 'what's our actual cost after the rebate' math.
Open calculatorA vendor sends a new wholesale price list. Here's the half-hour you spend repricing.
Marco Ferreira runs a restaurant in Pinewood Falls. His produce vendor emails Monday morning: tomato cost up 18%, lettuce up 12%, beef sirloin up 6%. He has 47 menu items, three of which use sirloin and roughly twelve of which use tomato in some meaningful quantity. Repricing the menu is going to take half a Sunday if he doesn't have a system. With one, it takes 30 minutes.
Open the margin calculator. He starts with the burger — current cost $4.20, current price $14, current margin 70%. Plug the new beef and tomato cost in: new food cost $4.55. To hold 70% margin he'd need to charge $15.17. Round to $15. Run the same exercise for each affected item. The cost-per-unit calculator handles the per-portion math on the bulk-purchase items where the supplier sells in 50-lb boxes and he needs to know cost per 6-oz portion.
He's not raising prices on every item. The Caesar salad goes up $1 because the lettuce hike is real and the customer expects it. The pasta primavera stays — he can absorb the tomato hit because the margin was 78% to start with and the dish is priced for the wine pairing, not the food cost. The break-even calculator answers the bigger question: at his fixed costs and the new variable cost structure, how many covers per week does he need to clear payroll plus rent? 412. He's averaging 540. He has room.
Last step: payroll. Two cooks worked overtime last week. Open the overtime calculator at $22/hr base — 6 hours of OT each, time-and-a-half, $396 of premium pay he wasn't expecting. The paycheck calculator nets that out for the cooks' direct deposit and the sales tax calculator handles a quick reconciliation against the POS report. Total time: 32 minutes. Total time without the tools: probably four hours and at least one math error he'd find at quarter close.
Put the small business toolkit on your site.
Free. No signup. No tracking pixel for your visitors. Works on WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow, or raw HTML. Customize colors and fonts to match your brand. Hosted and updated by us.
<iframe src="https://metricscalculator.com/embed/business/margin-calculator" width="100%" height="500" style="border:none;border-radius:8px" title="Margin Calculator" loading="lazy"> </iframe>
Standard iframe — no scripts, no dependencies. Drop it in any HTML block.
Before you bookmark.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the margin calculator showing gross margin or net margin?
Gross margin — (price − cost) ÷ price. That's the metric most relevant for product or menu pricing decisions. Net margin (after operating expenses) is something you derive from your P&L, not from a single calculator. Use this to set prices; use your bookkeeping software for net profitability.
Are the paycheck and overtime calculators accurate for my state?
The paycheck calculator includes federal withholding (2026 brackets), FICA (Social Security + Medicare), and state withholding for the 50 US states + DC. It does not include local city/county taxes (NYC, Philadelphia, etc.) or specialty deductions (401(k) match, HSA, garnishments). For exact net pay including those, your payroll provider (Gusto, ADP, QuickBooks Payroll) is authoritative. Use this for estimates.
Can I embed the margin or sales tax calculator on my business website?
Yes. Every calculator has a one-click embed builder. Pick colors, fonts, and border style; copy the iframe; paste into any website. Free, no signup. Common use cases: pricing page on a service business site (live margin calculator showing 'see what we charge and why'), or a contractor/vendor site showing sales tax rules to customers.
Do you have a calculator for figuring out my own salary as an owner?
The salary calculator handles hourly-to-annual conversion which is useful for the 'reasonable comp' conversation S-corp owners have with their accountants. For full owner draw vs salary modeling (especially S-corp election decisions), that's a tax-strategy conversation with your CPA, not a calculator output.
Will the embedded calculator track my customers' data?
No. All calculations run client-side in the visitor's browser. Nothing is sent to our servers, stored, or tracked. There's no PII collection, no cookies set on visitors by us, and no tracking pixel embedded in the iframe.
Which calculator gets the most use on a small business site?
Depends on the business. Service businesses (HVAC, lawn care, cleaning): sales tax calculator on the 'pricing' page. E-commerce: margin calculator on a 'wholesale inquiries' page. Restaurants and retail: less embed value because customers don't need to run the math — internal use is more important.
Other industries we've put together toolkits for.
For cpas & accountants
The tax and bookkeeping professional you'll work with on the back end of all this.
For financial advisors
Personal-finance and investment tools for the owner-side of small business wealth.
For marketing agencies
CAC and CLV tools when you're ready to actually measure marketing ROI.