Fixed Custom Expenses
The flat costs you pay whatever the month does, charged day by day.
What it means
Fixed Custom Expenses is the euro total of the flat costs you entered on Cost Settings, charged across the days your date range covers. Rent, payroll, software, insurance, a retainer — anything that doesn't move with sales. Entries you tagged as ad spend are included here too. Costs that scale with the month sit in Variable Custom ExpensesVariable Custom ExpensesSee the full entry., and the two together make Custom ExpensesCustom ExpensesSee the full entry..
Nothing arrives here on its own. A cost nobody typed in is missing from this line and from every profit figure beneath it.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
How each entry is charged. Every fixed expense is converted to a daily amount and applied to the days it overlaps your date range. It is not dropped into the month it's billed in.
Start and end dates matter. An entry with no end date keeps running forever. One that ended last March stops contributing the day it ended.
Worked example. Five entries: rent €3,000, payroll €12,000, software €900, an agency retainer €4,200 and an influencer fee €1,500 — €21,600 a month, or €720 a day. Select a full 30-day month and the line reads €21,600.
Select 1–10 of that month instead and it reads 720 × 10 = €7,200. Same costs, a third of the days. This is the single most common surprise on the page.
It answers the question
What does the shop cost to run across these days, before a single order arrives? It's the bill that turns up whether you sell nothing or sell out.
Why it matters
This is the part of your cost base that doesn't care how the month went. Variable costs fall with a quiet week; these don't, which is why a slow period turns into a loss faster than the sales drop alone suggests. It comes straight off Net ProfitNet ProfitThe bottom line you take home., euro for euro.
It's also the number most likely to be quietly wrong. Ad spend, product cost and payment fees arrive from connected data. This arrives from someone remembering to add an entry — and from someone else remembering to close it when the contract ended.
What good looks like
There's no standard amount: it depends on your team, your tools and whether you hold stock. Two checks do the work. First, completeness — would you sign this off as the real list of what you pay every month? Second, direction against sales: flat costs are healthy while revenue grows past them and dangerous when it doesn't. For a size-independent read, % Fixed Custom Expenses% Fixed Custom ExpensesSee the full entry. puts the same number against Total Sales.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Close the entries you stopped paying | Put an end date on every expense for a contract, tool or person that has finished | The line drops to what you actually pay | 1 week | It rewrites history as well as this month — last quarter's profit changes, and any report you already sent no longer matches. |
| Fast Audit the recurring software line | List every subscription in the fixed entries and cancel what nobody opened last month | A visible drop with no effect on sales | 1–2 weeks | Some apps quietly hold a flow, a feed or a review widget together. One wrong cancellation costs more revenue than the whole audit saves. |
| Slow Turn a flat retainer into a percentage | Renegotiate an agency or partner fee so it moves with sales, and re-enter it as a variable expense | Costs fall in quiet months instead of holding steady | 1 month | Strong months get more expensive, and across a growing year the percentage can total more than the retainer would have. |
| Slow Grow into the base you already pay for | Add sales without adding headcount, warehouse space or tools | The euro total holds flat while sales rise | 1–2 quarters | Running a bigger shop on the same team burns people out. The saving shows up months before the recruitment bill does. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
The split between fixed and variable is the real question underneath this line. It decides how much of a bad month you absorb.
The whole base grew
Every kind of cost went up. Fine in a growth month, and the shape that quietly erodes profit when sales flatten.
Locking in the cost
Costs moved from ones that shrink with a quiet month to ones that don't. Cheaper at volume, and much harder to survive a bad quarter on.
Lighter on your feet
More of your cost base now moves with the month. Usually costs more at peak and protects you when things slow.
Everything came down
Both fell. Deliberate trimming and a lapsed or missing expense entry look identical here — find out which one it was.
The euro total says what you pay; the share says whether the shop can carry it. Holding flat at €21,600 is a win in a growing month and a warning in a shrinking one, and only the percentage tells you which happened.
The gap between them is your flat marketing money. If they're identical, nothing has been tagged as ad spend — which is worth checking, because a retainer sitting untagged reads as overhead rather than as part of what you spend to get customers.
Common misreads
Check the date range. Fixed costs are charged per day, so a two-week range shows about half a month of rent. The figure follows the days you selected, not the billing cycle.
Fixed means it doesn't move with sales. It still changes when you edit an entry, when a contract starts or ends mid-range, and whenever you select a different number of days.
Only what someone entered. There's no default list, so a tool, a salary or a lease that was never added is missing from this line and from every profit number under it.
Also called
Fixed overheads · fixed operating costs · standing costs · recurring costs
See yoursYour fixed costs for the selected days, broken down by the categories you set up.
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