# Schedule C

The tax form where a sole proprietor reports the business.

A sole proprietor cannot pay themselves a salary, so this page of the personal tax return shows the business's earnings before any owner pay comes out. Reading a sole proprietor's tax return mostly means reading this page. The totals the IRS publishes from this form are also the closest public match to the [SDE](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/sde) margin an industry actually runs at.

In numbers: A two-truck operator reports $415k of net profit on Schedule C; that line, not the bank balance, is what a lender reads as earnings, and published industry margins are built from millions of these filings.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/schedule-c
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt