Rentabilitätsvorschau

Rentabilitätsvorschau is the forward looking profit forecast inside a Businessplan. It projects turnover, the cost of goods, personnel and the remaining operating costs over a period of usually three years, and it ends in an expected result for each of those years. It answers one question, namely whether the business earns anything once all costs are counted, and it answers it on paper before the money is committed.

It is not a cash plan. The forecast works in the logic of the profit and loss account, so a repayment instalment does not appear in it and an invoice counts in the period it belongs to rather than in the month it is paid. The Liquiditätsplanung works in the logic of the bank account instead, and the two can disagree for a long time. A pharmacy can show a profitable forecast and still run out of money in the fourth month, which is why a lender asks for both and reads them next to each other.

The forecast is judged on its assumptions rather than on its result. Every line rests on a stated number of customers, a stated average basket, a stated margin and a stated cost, and a reader who can see those numbers can argue with them. A forecast that arrives at a comfortable result without saying where the growth comes from is not persuasive, it is simply impossible to check. For a new service line this matters more than anywhere else. An uptake of a handful of appointments a week, stated plainly with the reasoning behind it, reads better than an optimistic figure, because the modest version can be defended in the meeting and can later be compared with what happened.

Sector figures are useful as a reality check on the result rather than as an input. The ABDA Apothekenwirtschaftsbericht published on 5 May 2026 put the Umsatzrendite of German pharmacies at 4,2 percent in 2025, down from 4,4 percent in 2024, so a forecast that lands far above that needs a reason a reader can follow. The result the forecast produces is the Betriebsergebnis line the plan will later be measured against. Running the same model with a cautious and an optimistic set of assumptions, a Szenarioanalyse, shows how much of the plan depends on the single number that is least certain.

How the projected result is taxed, and which items are recognised in which year, depends on the legal form and on the individual situation of the pharmacy, and it belongs with the Steuerberater before the plan is submitted.