What is Pretax Income (Earnings Before Taxes)?

Pretax Income (also called Earnings before Taxes) refers to the income earned by the business after adjusting for all operating expensesAll Operating ExpensesOperating expense (OPEX) is the cost incurred in the normal course of business and does not include expenses directly related to product manufacturing or service delivery. Therefore, they are readily available in the income statement and help to determine the net profit.read more, including non-cash expensesNon-cash ExpensesNon-cash expenses are those expenses recorded in the firm’s income statement for the period under consideration; such costs are not paid or dealt with in cash by the firm. It involves expenses such as depreciation.read more such as DepreciationDepreciationDepreciation is a systematic allocation method used to account for the costs of any physical or tangible asset throughout its useful life. Its value indicates how much of an asset’s worth has been utilized. Depreciation enables companies to generate revenue from their assets while only charging a fraction of the cost of the asset in use each year. read more and finance charges such as Interest payments, but before deduction of taxes from Income. It acts as a good performance measure as it doesn’t consider the impact of taxes, which may vary for a different jurisdiction.

Let’s see how it relates to the Income Statement of the business:Income Statement Of The Business:The income statement is one of the company’s financial reports that summarizes all of the company’s revenues and expenses over time in order to determine the company’s profit or loss and measure its business activity over time based on user requirements.read more

With Earnings Before Tax, one can easily measure the performance of businesses operating in different geographical locations, duly adjusting for leverage but without getting the impact of the taxation rules of the said jurisdiction. Analysts across the globe prefer to use EBT as a yardstick for comparing the performance of various firms.

Pretax Income Formula

EBT is the penultimate item in the Income statement before adjustment of taxes is undertaken. We can compute it using various methods. Some of the popular formulas for the calculation of Pretax Income are as follows:

Pretax Income formula = Gross Profit- Operating Expenses-Interest Expenses

Where Gross ProfitGross ProfitGross Profit shows the earnings of the business entity from its core business activity i.e. the profit of the company that is arrived after deducting all the direct expenses like raw material cost, labor cost, etc. from the direct income generated from the sale of its goods and services.read more =Net Sales- Cost of goods sold

Operating Expenses= General Administrative Expenses+ Selling and Distribution Expenses+ Depreciation

  • EBT formula = Operating Income- Interest ExpensePretax Income formula = Profit After Tax (PAT)+ Tax ExpensesPretax Income formula = Revenues- Expenses (excluding Income Taxes)

Examples of Pretax Income

Let’s understand the concept of Pretax Income with the help of a few examples:

Example #1

Sackett Laboratories is in the business of making medicines. The company reported Total Revenues of $40000 during the year ended Dec 2017. The company incurred manufacturing expenses amounting to $28000 during the year in manufacturing medicines.

Following are the expenses of the company during the year:

Based on the above information, we can do the calculation of Pretax income using the formula (discussed above)

Pretax Income formula = Net Sales- Cost of goods sold-Operating Expenses.

Thus Sackett Laboratories made an Earnings Before Tax of $6200 during the year.

Example #2

Let’s understand the same with the help of another example of a large listed Company.

From the above screenshot, we can easily see how the company’s pretax earnings have changed from 2000 to 2004 and can perform an analysis to measure Operational Efficiency.

Points worth noting based on the above analysis:

From 2000 to 2004 Revenues increased by 5.00% ( $86145 in 2000 to $104710 in 2004). However, Pretax Income has remained constant at 10% of revenues, and Net profit has remained constant at 6.5% year on year.

Thus Earnings Before Tax helps in understanding the Revenue growth and Profit growth in better terms and provides meaningful insights into comparing different businesses.

Advantages

          Effective Tax Rate= Income Tax Expense/ Pretax Income

  • It helps to easily compare the operational efficiency of different firms in the same industry in the same jurisdiction and a different jurisdiction.Earnings Before Tax helps better understand the revenues reported by the business. Comparing the Earnings Before Tax with the Revenues, one can understand whether sales are achieved by compromising business margins or through better pricing and business efficiency. Let’s understand the same with a small example:

As evident from the above figures, Net RevenuesNet RevenuesNet revenue refers to a company’s sales realization acquired after deducting all the directly related selling expenses such as discount, return and other such costs from the gross sales revenue it generated.read more grew from $35000 in 2016 to $50800 in 2018 and Pretax Income from $3000 in 2016 to $4000 in 2018. However, effective Margins fell from 8.57% in 2016 to 7.87% in 2018. Thus Earnings Before Tax helps in better

Limitations

  • It ignores the taxation effect and, as such, is not an ideal measure if somebody is planning to start a business as taxation is an important cash outflow and needs careful consideration.A certain business carries more taxes than others, such as Sin Tax and Higher Import Rates. Without a Taxation impact, a business decision might be influenced by that business, which carries high taxation rates.

Conclusion

Analysts and Investors use Pretax Income to track the performance of businesses. It is an important profit metric tracker for avoiding the impact of taxation in different jurisdictions and tax rates. Earnings Before Tax are determined per the provisions laid down in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP)GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) are standardized guidelines for accounting and financial reporting.read more, which are uniform all over. Also, Earnings Before Tax is a more consistent measure of profit than Net Income. The latter gets impacted by tax credit, tax penalties, etc., making earnings more volatile and difficult to project for future years.

An important point to note about Pretax Income and Taxable Income

If Taxable income is less than Pretax Income, and the cause of the difference is expected to reverse in future years, a Deferred Tax liabilityDeferred Tax LiabilityDeferred tax liabilities arise to the company due to the timing difference between the accrual of the tax and the date when the company pays the taxes to the tax authorities. This is because taxes get due in one accounting period but are not paid in that period.read more is created. Similarly, a Deferred Tax AssetDeferred Tax AssetA deferred tax asset is an asset to the Company that usually arises when either the Company has overpaid taxes or paid advance tax. Such taxes are recorded as an asset on the balance sheet and are eventually paid back to the Company or deducted from future taxes.read more is created if Taxable Income is greater than Earnings Before Tax, and the difference is expected to reverse in future years. It is important for Analysts and those tracking the business to consider the same while evaluating business performance.

This article has been a guide to what is Pretax Income (EBT). Here we discuss Earnings Before Tax formulas used to calculate Pretax Income and practical examples. You may learn more about financing from the following articles –

  • OPEX ExamplesWhat is EBIT?EBITDA Overview