A cabinet's month, in the account book
21 March 2026 · By Eleanor Whitmore · The Quarterly
A small piece of transparency: the cabinet's March 2026 in numbers, on the principle that a customer ought to be able to see, roughly, what they are part of when they buy from us.
One of the more pleasant differences between running a sole-trader cabinet and working at a larger shop is the freedom to talk publicly about the accounting. There is no shareholder to alarm, no quarterly call to massage, no compliance officer to consult. The numbers below are March 2026's actuals, taken from Iris's ledger and HMRC's quarterly self-assessment software. I have rounded to the nearest five pounds.
The month at a glance
| Orders shipped | 91 |
| Total sales (inc. postage) | £4,820 |
| Average order value | £53 |
| Inventory purchased | £1,915 |
| Royal Mail postage | £345 |
| Rent on the Henrietta Mews shop | £820 |
| Utilities, insurance, banking | £135 |
| Bertram & Iris part-time wages | £1,160 |
| Net to Eleanor (drawings) | £445 |
What this means in practice
Take a £35 board game off the shelf. Of that £35, roughly £14 paid the seller at the fair, £4 covered Royal Mail postage to your door, £6 went toward the rent on the shop, £4 paid Bertram and Iris for the time they spent on your parcel specifically, and a little over a pound went toward utilities and the rest of the standing costs. About £6 remained as my drawings.
I do not write this to argue our prices are tight (they are middling), nor that we are nobly underpaid (we make a reasonable living). I write it because it ought to be reasonably easy for any customer to see, in rough terms, where their money is going, and very few small online traders bother to lay it out.
What the website doesn't see
The numbers above include both website and walk-in trade. About sixty per cent of the cabinet's sales now come through millywillygames.uk; the other forty per cent walks through the Henrietta Mews door. The walk-in side of the business is what pays the shop rent and makes the website's flat-rate postage possible — it is, in that sense, the unspoken foundation of every parcel we send.
The tax position
Since several customers have asked: the cabinet is registered for UK VAT at the standard rate, which is included in every price shown on the website. I file VAT quarterly through HMRC's Making Tax Digital. The self-assessment for the personal income side is filed annually, on time, by my accountant in Trowbridge.
I take no salary in the conventional sense — sole traders cannot, technically. The £445 listed above as "drawings" is the personal income the business produced in March, against which I pay income tax and Class 4 National Insurance on next January's self-assessment. February was £390. April is, on current indications, going to be closer to £550 thanks to Easter.
Anyone who would like to see the cabinet's full accounting policy — what we count, what we exclude, how we treat samples and reviewer copies — is welcome to write to [email protected]. Iris will reply.