Home Depot Operating Leverage

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The concept of operating leverage can explain the three percent decline in sales that caused the twenty-one percent decline in profits. Operating leverage is a measurement of the degree to which a firm incurs a combination of fixed and variable costs. Basically, operating leverage is a cost accounting formula that displays how well a company is utilizing its fixed costs to generate a profit. Managers use fixed costs as a level to achieve disproportionate changes between revenue and profitability. Furthermore, a business can have either a high or low operating level, which is influenced by either the volume of sales and contribution of margin or the proportion of fixed costs and variable costs. Therefore, the more profit a firm can generate …show more content…

The margin of safety assesses the cushion between budgeted sales and break-even sales. Furthermore, a break-even point identifies when an investment will generate a positive return. Therefore, it is where sales revenues minus variable and fixed costs generate zero profits (Kampf, Majerčák, & Švagr, 2016). The margin of safety calculates the sum by which actual sales can fall short of expectancies before a company will start undergoing deficits. In order to determine the margin of safety, break-even sales are deducted from budgeted sales and the variance is then divided by budgeted sales. Therefore, without a major change in the company’s fixed cost structure, a decline in the company’s sales will cause their net earnings to be closer to their break-even point, which in turn will effectively lower their margin of safety. Furthermore, a decrease in sales on the margin of safety will be unfavorable. Moreover, the reduction in sales reduces the contribution, thereby reducing net income and the end result is a decline in the margin of safety. Therefore, due to lower sales, Home Depot’s margin of safety will be lower if a change in budgeted sales is not implemented (Edmonds et al.,

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