Business calculation skills

Every business calculation sits inside a scenario — a garden centre, a phone repair shop or a small bakery — so read the question twice and pick out only the figures you need, along with their labels. Financial data often arrives in a table or a short extract: sales revenue, cost of sales, other operating expenses and interest, total profit, the number of years the project lasts and the cost of investment. In an investment question the lifespan and cost may be buried in the sentences rather than the table, so note them down with their labels before you choose a formula.

Show your workings

A calculator is allowed, but write the formula and the figures you put into it. Correct workings can still earn credit when the final number goes wrong — a two-mark calculation usually gives one mark for the right formula or correctly substituted figures and one mark for the right answer. For example, writing (42,000 ÷ 140,000) × 100 shows an examiner exactly what you did, and they can follow it even if you press a key wrongly.

Units and rounding

Match the unit used in the question. A profit or revenue answer, or the cost of an investment, is money, written in the same currency unit as the data. A margin or average rate of return answer is a percentage, so remember to multiply by 100 before writing it — 0.3 is not the same answer as 30%. If the question asks for a set number of decimal places, give exactly that many digits after the point and round the last digit correctly.

Finish with one clear final answer, in its unit, in the answer space: show your workings, then write something like “Gross profit margin = 30%” underneath, rather than leaving several scattered half-finished sums.