Your tax return is built to show the smallest legal profit, because profit is what gets taxed. Buyers price your business on what it really earns. This worksheet shows the difference.
Now add back what the business pays for that a buyer would not. Skip anything that does not apply.
A real person reads your actual returns, proves every add-back a buyer will accept, and builds the price report, buyer pitch, payment math, NDA, and playbook. Ready in minutes.
An add-back is an expense on your books that a new owner would not have to pay. Your salary is the biggest one: a buyer stops paying it the day they take over, so that money is theirs. Same with the truck the business pays for, your health insurance, the phone, the family member on payroll, and the one-time roof repair that will not happen again.
None of this is a trick. It is the standard way owner-operated businesses are priced, and SBA lenders expect to see it. The number you land on has a name: seller's discretionary earnings, or SDE.
Say an owner reads the tax return, sees $50,000 of profit, and guesses the business is worth $40,000. Add back $20,000 of owner pay and personal costs and the earnings are $70,000. At about 2 times, the same business is worth roughly $140,000. Nothing about the business changed. The add-backs were always there.
Two ways. First, no paper trail: if you cannot point to the line on the return and explain it, a buyer's lender strikes it. Second, it is not really discretionary: a manager you would have to replace is a cost of running the business, not an add-back. Claiming those hurts you, because it makes a buyer doubt the honest ones.
That is the work in the $299 Sale Package: a real person reads your actual returns, proves every add-back a buyer will accept, and puts the math where a lender can follow it. You can also see your likely price range free in 60 seconds.