A cost-volume-profit-example – a child care facility

The BRiC charging (Photo credit: fe2cruz)

In this and the next post, I will give you two simple examples of cost-volume-profit (CVP) analysis in action. CVP analysis, or sometimes it’s called break-even analysis, is a useful decision tool for any business to understand effects of cost changes or sales volume changes on underlying profit.

The first example relates to small Montessori school run by someone I know. In Ireland, preschool children get some free childcare and the owner of the facility gets paid €250 per child per month. The Montessori in question is insured to have 11 children with one staff member, but beyond this a second employee is needed. The full capacity of the school is 15 children and the extra employee costs €620 per month. This is a fixed cost. If you do some quick calculations, you can see that it takes 3 children (€ 750) to cover the employee cost. Thus, the owner needs to have 11 or less children with one employee, or 14 or more with two employees. So you can see how the fixed cost increase affects the volume needed to keep profit levels stable. There may of course be some additional variable costs with more children, but I am ignoring these to keep the example simple.