Profit-Volume (PV) Chart

Business folk love charts. It’s like pornography for accountants and people with business degrees. You should see the centerfold of Charts Quarterly.

So...these types really go bonkers for a good profit-volume chart. It shows a company's earnings related to its volume of sales. The chart provides a graphic display of the profitability of either the company or a particular profit (or if the company is losing money, it tracks the level of losses compared to the volume of sales).

Business folk (once they get over just how sexy they think these PV charts are) can use them to study profitability, or calculate the expected value of future investment, or discover things like breakeven points.