It was permissible that expenses should go up in the second fiscal year, for the volume of sales increased very rapidly. The cost per unit of sales or the ratio of expenses to total sales had decreased greatly. An arrow pointing downward would have given a wrong impression as the total expenses had increased justifiably. It is better, therefore, to avoid using arrows than to use arrows which would mean nothing.
The real story of this automobile branch house is seen in Fig. 210 which gives the profit-and-loss curve corresponding to the sales and expense curves of Fig. 209. Expenses of the branch house were fairly large throughout the whole year, because of fixed charges, while the great fluctuation in sales caused a loss during the many months in which the volume of sales was small. Note how much better the profits were in the second year than in the first year, because the business had been established long enough to have a fairly good volume of sales during the fall months. There was a profit in all the months of the second year except two, with a total profit of very considerable size, though not a tremendous one compared with the volume of sales, since the profit was only 5.9 per cent of the sales. In the third year the profits were on the ragged edge throughout the whole year except in the three spring months of March, April, and May when sales were exceptionally large. The total profits for the year, even with a slightly increased volume of sales, were less than one-third of what they had been for the preceding year.
Just to show what complex conditions enter into the comparison of business curves of this sort, it is mentioned here that the small volume of sales, the large expenses, and the negligible profits in the first half of the third fiscal year were not the fault of the manager of this branch house. The trouble went back to the factory engineering department which failed to get its next season's models designed early enough. Consequently the car could not be manufactured in sufficient quantities to give the branch manager enough cars to make a satisfactory volume of sales. The branch manager blamed the factory because the factory could not deliver a sufficient quantity of cars. The factory manager was not to blame, however, as the engineering department (reporting direct to the president instead of to the factory manager) had delayed the design for the new car, and the factory manager was, of course, unable to build a car until he had the drawings. This example will perhaps give a fair idea of the uses which can be made of curves plotted from the operating figures of a complex business.
