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How to Add Overhead & Custom Costs

How to track non-marketing costs like salaries, rent, and software — and include them in your CM3 and CAC calculations.

Written by Frank Birzle

⚠️ Note: For detailed Custom Marketing Costs (e.g. influencer campaigns or agencies without a native integration), there's a separate CMC sheet that supports ad-level UTM mapping. See: Tracking Custom Marketing Costs

The Custom Costs sheet is for any cost that doesn't belong in a marketing platform — overhead like salaries, rent, and software subscriptions. These costs flow into your CM3 and can optionally impact your CAC calculation.


Step 1: Create a Custom Costs sheet

  1. In the left sidebar, go to Store ConfiguratorData Sources

  2. Click Add Data SourceAdd New Data Source

  3. Select Custom Costs (note: "CMC" is a different sheet and cannot be used for overhead costs)

  4. Enter a name (e.g. Custom Costs DE) and click Create Google Sheet for Custom Costs


Step 2: Open the Google Sheet

Click on the newly created datasource to open its detail page, then click Open Google Sheet.


Step 3: Enter your costs

Fill in the sheet:

  • Start Date and End Date — the period this cost applies to

  • Monthly Recurring — if checked, the amount re-occurs every month between start and end date. Use this for fixed monthly expenses like rent or software subscriptions (when using this functionality you need to add as start date the first day of a month and as end date the last day of a month)

  • Cost Category — a predefined dropdown that determines where the cost appears in your margin waterfall.

    The available options are:

    • COGS — product costs, affects CM1

    • Logistics Costs — fulfillment costs, affects CM2

    • Payment Costs — transaction fees, affects CM2

    • Marketing Costs — non-integrated marketing spend (e.g. agency fees not tracked via API), affects CM3

    • Overhead Costs — general overhead like rent, salaries, or software subscriptions, affects CM3

  • Sub-category — optional further breakdown.
    For Overhead Costs, the available options are: Salary, Rent, Software, Operations, Agency, Other Overhead, Fixed Marketing Costs

  • Impacts CAC — tick this if the cost should be included in your Customer Acquisition Cost calculation. Only tick costs that are directly related to acquiring customers.

⚠️ Note: Enter amounts without currency symbols, using a decimal point not a comma (e.g. 2500.00).


Step 4: Sync and verify

Klar syncs the sheet automatically several times a day. To trigger a manual sync, open the datasource detail page and click Sync Data — it takes a few minutes to complete.

Once synced, your costs appear in the Profitability report. Any cost marked as Impacts CAC also feeds into your CAC metric.

Your overhead and custom costs are now set up and will flow into your CM3 and CAC automatically.

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