What Is Revenue? | Wall Street Oasis

Revenue is one of the most basic and fundamental financial figures for a company. It is the total amount of income from the sale of its products and/or services. Revenue is also known as gross income.

The calculation for revenue is:

Sum (Price of Good x Quantity Sold)

I.e. the sum of the income generated from selling each unit.

Most of the figures in financial statement projections are based on a percentage of revenue. Although revenue in itself is very important for working out all the other figures of a company's financials, revenue in itself does not actually say anything about profitability.

Related Terms

Return to Finance Dictionary

Patrick Curtis

Patrick Curtis is a member of WSO Editorial Board which helps ensure the accuracy of content across top articles on Wall Street Oasis. He has experience in investment banking at Rothschild and private equity at Tailwind Capital along with an MBA from the Wharton School of Business. He is also the founder and current CEO of Wall Street Oasis. This content was originally created by member WallStreetOasis.com and has evolved with the help of our mentors.

Related Content

What exactly does it mean to generate revenue?

Hi all, There's been a lot of talk regarding "generating revenue" in order to be promoted up the ladder quicker. I was wondering what exactly that means, how does a VP generate revenue? Are we talking about revenue in terms of investment banking fees? Does this mean that some technology-related product groups generated a lot more "revenue" than the other product groups in the late 1990's? ...

How do you calculate future revenue?

I'm pretty new at all of this so please bear with me. So suppose you have financial data for a company and you want to project future revenue so that you can do an analysis. What do you do? Do you find the Ebitda multple and multiply that by the this year's revenue? Or do you take the ...

Selling Research for Revenue?

Is it possible to you research of company as a public form of revenue? The plan is to start an advisory firm with consulting, accounting, management services (to name a few). In terms of service fees, if I can get a company to agree to publicly disclose their financial performance rather than ...

GP distributions part of revenue?

When modelling the revenues of a holding company, do you take into account distributions from daughter MLPs as revenue? or is it considered a non-operating income? I would guess since the company is *aiming* to become a holding company, then these distributions should be part of core revenue? What ...

How do M&A advisory firms generate revenue?

Hey guys, I did an internship in CorpDev and I was able to get a small glimpse into how M&A firms make money and the fees they typically charge. However, I was wondering if anyone, particularly at a smaller M&A advisory firm, had some insight into ways M&A advisory firms make money. Here are some things I came across during my internship:-M&A success fees (generally 1%, varies as you go up and down deal size)-M&A breakup fee (if deal doesn't go through, from what I saw it was like 10-20% of the M&A success fee) However, I did some searching and I had a couple things I was wondering about:-How much do fairness opinions typically cost?-How much does a retainer fee typically cost? ...