“Hang on. They take a cut of every booking, as well as the monthly fee?”
I hear some version of this more often than you’d think. Usually it comes up when we’re going through someone’s figures line by line, and a cost they’d stopped noticing years ago suddenly looks a lot bigger than they thought. The work is coming in and the prices look fine, but somehow less of each sale ends up staying in the business.
Very often, the answer is the fees you never see.
Why hidden fees are so easy to miss
Most business costs arrive as a bill. You see the invoice, you pay it, you know it’s there. Hidden fees work differently. They’re taken off before the money reaches you, so they never feel like spending.
A booking platform pays you what’s left after its commission. A card machine provider settles your takings minus its charges. A marketplace keeps its cut and passes on the rest. Your bank statement shows the smaller figure, and unless you go looking, the fee simply disappears into “that’s what came in”.
The other reason they’re easy to miss is that each one looks small. A few per cent here, a monthly subscription there. Nobody sits down and adds them all up, so nobody notices that together they can be taking a real slice of every sale.
The usual suspects
When I look through a small business’s costs, these are the ones that most often come as a surprise:
- commission on bookings or jobs from platforms, agencies and directories
- card payment and online payment charges, including monthly terminal fees
- marketplace and app fees, sometimes on top of a listing or management fee
- software subscriptions that have quietly multiplied, or that nobody uses any more
- bank charges and finance fees that crept up without anyone being told
None of these is wrong in itself. A platform that brings you work you’d never have found alone can be worth every penny. The problem is not knowing what it costs, so you can’t decide whether it’s worth it.
What you can do this week
Look at one month properly. Take last month’s statements, including any payout reports from platforms and card providers, and list every fee, commission and subscription. Add them up as a total for the month.
Work out what each sale actually leaves behind. Here’s an illustrative example (not a real client). A business takes a £200 job through a booking platform. The platform keeps 15% in commission, so £170 arrives. Card charges take a little more. On paper it was a £200 sale. In reality the business is working with a lot less before it’s paid for materials, time or tax. If prices were set on the £200, the margin is thinner than the owner thinks.
Ask three questions about each fee. Is it bringing in work or value I wouldn’t get otherwise? Is there a cheaper way to get the same thing? Is it in my prices? Sometimes the answer is to keep the fee and price for it. Sometimes it’s to move customers onto a cheaper way to book or pay. Sometimes it’s simply to cancel something nobody uses.
Put a date in the diary to do it again. Fees change. Providers raise their charges, new subscriptions sneak in. A cost review isn’t a one-off.
Where this gets handled in the Sunnyside Profit System
This is what the Control stage of the Sunnyside Profit System is for. It runs in months two and three of the programme, and one of its jobs is reviewing every regular cost in the business, using your real figures from your accounting software, not a guess.
In the Control stage we go through the costs together, work out which ones are earning their place, and decide what to keep, renegotiate, reprice for or stop. Alongside that, we set your owner’s pay as a figure on a regular date and set up a tax pot that builds every time you’re paid. By the end of it you have your 12-month Profit Plan, so the decisions you’ve made don’t just sit in a spreadsheet.
Where you could be instead
What you’d have is a clear list of every regular cost, a decision made on each one, and prices that take your fees into account. What we’re aiming for is that feeling of knowing what each sale really leaves behind, and that the money coming in is doing a job rather than leaking away. Every business is different, so I won’t promise what you’ll find. But most owners are surprised by at least one line.
Your next step
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on where your money is really going, book a free call about your profit. Or see how the whole journey works, stage by stage, on our profit packages page.
This is general information, not advice for your situation. Every business is different, so check with your accountant before acting on it.
