Tracking your P&L properly
Ask a flipper what they made last week and you will get a confident number. Ask them to show the arithmetic and the number usually shrinks. Tax, unsold remainders and the buys that never filled all live in the gap between the two.
There is a version of flipping where you remember the wins in detail and the losses as bad luck, the tax never quite gets subtracted, and the bank total does the reassuring. It feels fine and it teaches you nothing, because you cannot improve a number you are not measuring.
Why memory lies
Not through dishonesty. Through structure. Four things happen to every flipper's recollection.
- Completed flips are memorable, abandoned ones are not. A buy that sat for four hours and got cancelled leaves no trace and no story, so it never enters the total, even though it cost you a slot and locked up gold.
- Gross margin is what you looked at. You saw the spread before you bought and you remember that number, not the smaller one that arrived after tax.
- The unsold half is still yours. Items sitting in your bank feel like assets rather than an open position, so a flip that is 60% done gets remembered as done.
- A growing bank total covers everything. If you are also questing, killing bosses or selling drops, the bank goes up for reasons that have nothing to do with flipping and flatter it anyway.
None of that is unusual and none of it is a character flaw. It is what happens to any activity with a lot of small events and no receipt at the end. The reason it matters here is that flipping is one of the few things in the game where the difference between a good process and a bad one is a few percent per position, and a few percent is exactly the size of error that memory cannot detect. You can flip badly for a month, feel fine about it, and only notice because the bank did not move.
The six things that have to be recorded
A ledger is honest when it can answer each of these without you thinking.
- Units actually bought and the price they filled at. Not the price you offered. If a buy of 5,000 filled 3,100 at your price, the position is 3,100.
- Units actually sold and the price they filled at. Same rule on the way out, and it is more common to be partially filled selling than buying.
- Tax paid. Charged per item on every sale, win or lose.
- Remainders. Bought but not yet sold. These are open, not finished.
- Buys that never completed. They produce no profit and no loss, but they consumed a slot and held gold for a measurable amount of time.
- When it started and when it closed. Profit without duration is not comparable to anything. 200,000 gp in an hour and 200,000 gp over three days are different trades.
The tax, exactly
The Grand Exchange charges the seller 2% of the sale price. Three details change real numbers.
- It is calculated per item and rounded down, so on cheap items the effective rate is slightly under 2%.
- It is capped at 5,000,000 gp per item, which means anything selling above 250M pays a shrinking percentage.
- Items priced under 50 gp are not taxed at all, and bonds are exempt at any price.
The consequence people miss is that break even is above your entry, always. If you bought a mahogany plank at 1,801 gp, selling at 1,801 loses you 36 gp. The lowest price that gets you back to level is 1,837, because 1,837 minus a 36 gp tax leaves 1,801. Every flip you plan should start from the break even price, not the buy price.
Write the break even price down before you place the buy. It takes two seconds and it removes the single most common accounting mistake in flipping, which is treating a sale at cost as a flat outcome.
Realised, unrealised, and committed
Three separate quantities, and mixing them is how flippers convince themselves a bad week was a good one.
Realised
Gold that has finished the round trip. Bought, sold, tax paid, in your coin pouch. This is the only number that belongs in a profit total.
Unrealised
The value of what you are still holding, marked at what you could sell it for today, minus the tax you would pay. Useful for knowing where you stand, dangerous to count as profit, because an unrealised gain can go to zero and an unrealised loss can be waited out. Track it separately and never add it to the week's total.
Committed
Gold currently inside offers. Not profit at all, but the denominator for everything else. Making 500,000 gp on 5M committed is a completely different result from making 500,000 gp on 80M committed, and only one of those two facts is visible if you record profit alone.
One day, written out properly
Position A. 18,000 nature runes bought at 135, cost 2,430,000. All filled. Sold all 18,000 at 140. Tax = floor(0.02 × 140) = 2 per rune, so you receive 138 each, 2,484,000 total.
Realised: +54,000 gp.
Position B. 13,000 mahogany planks offered at 1,801, committing 23,413,000. Only 8,400 filled, so the real position cost 15,128,400.
You sold 6,000 of them at 1,856. Tax = floor(0.02 × 1,856) = 37 each, so you receive 1,819 each, 10,914,000. Those 6,000 cost 10,806,000.
Realised: +108,000 gp. Still held: 2,400 planks that cost 4,322,400.
Position C. 2,000 Prayer potion(4) offered at 9,206, committing 18,412,000. Nothing filled. Cancelled after three hours.
Realised: 0. Cost: one slot and 18.4M held still for three hours.
Day total realised: 162,000 gp. Peak committed: roughly 36M. Slots used: 3.
The remembered version of that day is "two good flips and one that did not go". The written version says something far more useful: the profit came almost entirely from a position that only half filled, the prayer potion slot was dead for three hours, and 162,000 gp on 36M of committed gold is under half a percent. Now you have three specific things to change tomorrow.
Notice also that Position B is not finished. The 2,400 remaining planks are unrealised. If they sell tomorrow at the same price they add roughly 43,000 gp, and if the price slips they may add nothing. Tomorrow's ledger gets that, not today's.
A ledger you can keep by hand
If you would rather do this manually, a spreadsheet with eight columns covers everything above. One row per position, opened when you place the buy.
- Item
- Buy price and units filled
- Break even price, worked out at the time
- Sell price and units sold
- Tax paid, which is units sold multiplied by the rounded down 2%
- Realised profit
- Units still held
- Opened and closed timestamps
Two rules make it survive contact with reality. Open the row when you place the offer, not when it fills, so cancelled buys exist in the record. And close the row only when the last unit is sold, so half finished positions cannot quietly become wins.
A hand ledger is slow, and that is its main weakness. Most people keep it for a fortnight, discover something genuinely surprising about their own trading, and then stop.
What My Flips does for you
My Flips keeps the same ledger automatically. When the GE Uncut plugin for RuneLite is linked to your account, your actual Grand Exchange fills are recorded as they happen: what filled, at what price, how many units, and when. Profit is computed after tax, partial fills are handled as partial, and a position stays open until the last unit is sold.
Because the record comes from your own offers rather than from a plan, it also captures the things a plan never sees. Buys that never completed, positions that took three days instead of three hours, and items where you consistently sell for less than you intended all show up on their own.
Completed flips file themselves into your history, so the running total is realised profit rather than optimism. If you trade on more than one account, each is shown separately, which matters for the reasons covered in lesson 6.
One feature is worth setting up before you need it. Positions can be sorted into named portfolios, and each portfolio carries its own deployed capital, open profit and banked results. That turns the second question in the weekly review below from a calculation into something you read, and it lets you answer a better question than "did I make money": which of the things I am doing makes money. Put your fast staples in one and your patient positions in another, and after a few weeks the two totals settle an argument that is otherwise pure recollection. New flips start in Main until you move them.
If you want a rough sense of where your week sits against other people's, the leaderboard ranks banked gains over a rolling week under generated names. Treat it as a thermometer rather than a target: it counts gains only, everyone on it is running a different bank at a different risk, and chasing a position on it is exactly the impulse this lesson is trying to replace with a ledger.
Automatic or manual, the same discipline applies to reading it. Three things should never be added into a profit figure, and all three get added constantly.
- Alchemy value. An item you can high alch for more than you paid is not profit until you have alched it and paid for the runes. It is a floor under the position, which is useful, and it is not a sale.
- The price recovering while you hold. A position that is down 400,000 and then down only 100,000 has not made 300,000. It has lost 100,000 so far.
- Gold that arrived from anywhere else. Drops, quest rewards, skilling output and gear you sold are not flipping profit, and mixing them in is the fastest way to lose the ability to tell whether your flipping works.
The weekly review
Whatever records it, the point is what you ask it once a week. Five questions.
- What did I realise, after tax? One number, no unrealised gains attached.
- On how much committed gold? Profit divided by capital is the figure that tells you whether the week was actually good.
- How many positions did not fill? If it is more than a fifth, your prices are optimistic rather than your luck bad.
- Which item made most of it? Frequently one or two items carry a whole week, and knowing which changes what you look for next.
- How long did the average flip take? Compare it against what is normal for that kind of item in the fill times guide.
Those five questions are also what makes the rest of this track usable. The compounding arithmetic in the next lesson needs a real growth rate, not a hoped for one, and you can only get that from a ledger that counts the tax, the remainders and the flips that never happened. If you want to see how we measure the same things on our own signals, the win rate guide shows the method.
Item pages used above
Live prices, volume and buy limits for the items in this lesson: Nature rune, Mahogany plank and Prayer potion(4).
GE Uncut is an unofficial, fan-made tool, not affiliated with or endorsed by Jagex Limited. RuneScape and Old School RuneScape are trademarks of Jagex Limited; in-game content and item images are the property of Jagex Limited, used for reference only. Price data is from the OSRS Wiki real-time prices API. See data attribution.