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You’ve heard the term “break even.” It’s a popular way to describe a time when you spent exactly as much money as you made. “We gambled $200 at the casino and won $200, so we broke even.”

But in a business context, it’s not that simple.

Your break even point doesn’t just happen in Vegas, and needs to be constantly recalculated for you to turn a profit in the long term. Here’s how to find it.

Find Your Contribution Margin

Recently, I explained how a business calculates its contribution margin — the amount (ideally in the form of a percentage) that your revenue from sales exceeds your variable costs to develop the product. There are two reasons you should care about this figure.

First, your contribution margin deliberately leaves out your operating costs so you can see exactly how profitable your product is. For example, while software and website costs to an ecommerce clothing business don’t directly contribute to the business’s product (the clothing), the cost its thread vendor charges does. The business omits the first cost because it only wants to see how profitable its clothing is against what it pays to produce it.

The second reason contribution margin is so important? You need it to calculate your break even point.

Although operating costs are irrelevant when assessing a product’s profitability, they’re critical when assessing your business’s profitability. These costs, also called fixed costs, factor back into your books when calculating your profit margin — your total profitability after all business expenses paid. And in order to achieve a high profit margin, you first need to know when you’ll break even.

Keep in mind that a break even point isn’t a finish line. Breaking even is an exciting milestone for a growing business, but the break even point indicates when the business’s revenue will be equal to its costs — not when it is. Businesses run the equation described above multiple times a year, eventually surpassing their break even point and (hopefully) becoming profitable.

So why is this number recalculated all the time? Once you “break even,” aren’t you officially on the road to profitability? Yes and no. If you were to calculate your break even point according to yearly revenue, yearly fixed costs, and yearly contribution margin, then yes, you’d get a number that is more representative of the business’s profitability since you’re considering a full year of activity. And once you break even, you wouldn’t have to track your break even point as often.

But there are shorter-term break even points that reset on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis to guide you as you strive to reach your end-of-year (EOY) break even point.

For example, if fixed costs such as your monthly office rent total $3000, and your product has a contribution margin of $250 per unit, you’d have to sell 12 units of your product by the end of the month to break even for that month. See how I came up with this number below:

The following month, you’re back to square one, as you’re on the hook for $3000 worth of bills for next month and need to sell another 12 products to, once again, break even for that period of time.

Set Goals to Become Profitable

Luckily, as a business grows, it won’t have to meet these incremental break even points in order to declare itself profitable by EOY. The business’s monthly revenue can even come up short of a month’s fixed costs, but break even or declare the business profitable at the end of the year.

How? With seasonal fluctuations in sales, you might fall short one month but become super busy during a holiday and make up for it. Perhaps you host a flash sale that reduces revenue in the short term but develops brand loyalty that brings in long-term customers, and a more steady revenue stream. Just be sure you calculate your break even point first before running a sale or discount so you can set appropriate goals for the sale itself. Houston, we have a profit.

Now it’s time for you to calculate your business’s break even point … How’d you do? Did you plug your sales figures into the formula above and get a scary number? Don’t sweat it — that’s why these incremental break even points are so helpful to a growing business.

If you’re discouraged by how much work you’d have to do to break even by the end of the year, shorten the time period of your break even point. By setting a goal to break even every week or month right now, you can set yourself up to break even after larger stretches of time later. 

Just as Facebook is starting to recover from last week’s Congressional hearings with its CEO and releases statements on how it uses offsite user data, a new research report has emerged that may indicate another case of misused data.

This time, the culprit might be the “login with Facebook” API and the third-party JavaScript trackers embedded on websites that use it. First reported by Freedom to Tinker and TechCrunch, it seems that these trackers can be exploited to collect data like a user’s data including name, email address, age range, gender, locale, and profile photo — to the extent of the information the user provided when it used this tool to log into the website.

As the name suggests, webmasters embed third-party JavaScript to, well, track user behavior on their sites — things like how far someone scrolls down or where they clicked.

It can help digital marketers, for example, “figure out what works and what doesn’t,” says HubSpot Director of Web Development Dmitry Shamis, “and optimize your site as a result.”

Tools like “login with Facebook” are designed to save new users time when creating a new account or enrolling in a website for the first time, by automatically populating fields (name, email address, et cetera) with information provided on their Facebook accounts, rather than requiring them to fill them in manually. 

Many sites allow users to log in with Google in a similar capacity.

But now, it seems, vulnerabilities have been discovered in this system. In addition to granting the website or service in which the user is enrolling access to his or her data, third party javascript trackers embedded on that same site also receive access to the same data during the login process.

Here’s an from Freedom to Tinker that visually explains how something like this works:

Source: Freedom to Tinker

What we haven’t determined yet is how these trackers use the data once it’s obtained. However, within the list of “offending” trackers discovered by Freedom to Tinker, it appears that the parent companies that manufacture them also offer “publisher monetization services based on collected user data,” according to TechCrunch.

That could suggest a situation similar to the Cambridge Analytica one, in which an app developer collected personal data from users who opted into downloading it — but then, improperly sold it to the data analytics firm.

But it doesn’t stop there — Freedom to Tinker discovered a second vulnerability. On some sites, after users log in with Facebook, it seems that some third-party trackers use that data to “deanonymize users for targeted advertising,” which means that it can use login information to personally identify users, which is a privacy breach and typically not something that users agree to.

This happened with the site BandsInTown (possibly among others), which alerts people when the musicians they like are playing shows nearby. Logging in with Facebook helps BandsInTown track their favorite artists and let them know when they go on tour.

But as it turns out, there was yet another third-party tracker embedded in BandsInTown’s iframe — an HTML document that is embedded inside another, such document on a website — which personally identified users logging in with Facebook, presumably for advertising purposes.

Source: Freedom to Tinker

After reaching out BandsInTown about the issue, Freedom to Tinker says it was told by the site that the flaw has been addressed and repaired.

And while Freedom to Tinker is sure to point out that these vulnerabilities are not the result of flaws within the login with Facebook tool — and is rather due to what the site describes as a “lack of security boundaries between the first-party and third-party scripts” on the affected sites — Facebook is certain to experience some blowback as a result of its user data once again being compromised.

When TechCrunch reached out to Facebook, it didn’t receive a response being told that the social network was investigating the issue. 

“This couldn’t come at a more inconvenient time for Facebook,” says Henry Franco, HubSpot’s social campaign strategy associate. “You can’t help but get the idea that a lifetime of shortcuts is finally catching up, putting the company on the defensive at a time when it needs all the wins it can get.”

On top of that, Franco says, “I’m sure there will be more bad news as the company does a full audit of app developers on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica revelation.”

HubSpot Product Lead Daria Marmer agrees that this report will only complicate things for Facebook — as it not only has to make sure its own site is secure, but also needs to “police others on the web.”

That might require playing catchup with sites that already have a method and operation for doing so, Marmer says. “Google does a good job of this: letting website owners know if their sites are insecure or getting attacked.”

“As interconnected as today’s systems are, it’s easier than ever to create unintended side effects,” says Ryan Stinson, HubSpot’s manager of security engineering. “Events like these call for an even more heightened awareness of people’s privacy needs, and taking a privacy-first approach to service.”

This is an ongoing situation that continues to unfold as we await comment from Facebook and its aforementioned app audit is underway.