What the Ecommerce overview number means

Ecommerce › Overview opens with one figure and the words that say what it includes, so you can answer "did the store make money this period" without reading a table. Underneath it, a single bar shows where the money went: revenue first, then each cost, then what was left.

When it says "profit" and when it does not

Most of the time it does not, because most of the time it is not profit yet, and a profit number that quietly leaves costs out is worse than no number at all. So the label always states its own basis. If it reads After payment processing and advertising, then those two costs are the only ones taken off. Read the label, not the size of the number.

The label changes as TALISK_HQ learns more of your costs. Turn on product costs and cost of goods joins the bar and the wording. Capture your carrier bills and shipping joins it. Capture your advertising bills and advertising joins it. Nothing is hidden behind a tooltip: if a cost is named in the label, it is in the figure, and if it is not named, it is not.

There are two labels you will only see once you track the cost of your stock, whichever of the two ways you use to do it.

• After known costs means cost of goods is on the bar but TALISK_HQ does not have a cost for everything you sold this period. The figure is still shown, and the gap under the bar tells you how much of your sales it does not cover. This one belongs to Shopify product costs. Counting your stock has nothing to be partly missing, because a count covers the whole shelf however it sold.

• Store contribution is the strongest thing this screen will ever say. It appears once the bar carries a cost of goods, and each way of tracking stock earns it differently. On Shopify product costs it is said when at least 95% of the period's sales have a recorded cost, measured by sales value rather than by how many products are on the list. On stock counts it is said when your latest posted count is less than a quarter old and this period really carries the cost of goods that count produced.

  Contribution means what the store brought in, less the costs of making those sales. It is not a profit, and the line under the figure says so: your overheads, such as rent, software, insurance, professional fees and interest, arrive as bills and are nowhere in it. For the profit of the whole business, after everything, use the profit and loss report in Ledger › Reports.

  A bar that does not carry a cost of goods is never called a contribution. The biggest cost of selling something is the stock itself, so until that is on the bar the label lists the costs it did take off and nothing more.

  Cost of goods here counts everything in your cost of goods account, whether it arrived from a stock count or was coded there when you entered the bill. Both are real cost of goods. Expensing stock as you buy it and letting the count correct at the end is the ordinary way to run periodic inventory, and the arithmetic still lands: opening stock plus what you bought less what you counted is what it cost you. Like shipping and advertising, this figure is book-wide and is not split by sales channel.

If any of your sales settled through Square, Stripe or PayPal, those payouts carry no product-level cost in TALISK_HQ, so their coverage cannot be measured. On Shopify product costs the screen says so and holds back the word "profit" rather than guessing. Stock counts do not have that limit, so those sales do not hold the word back on a book that counts.

If your cost of goods comes from stock counts, the screen says so too: it is valued at cost, and it arrives in chunks on your count dates, so anything bought since your last count is not in it yet. A period between two counts can show no cost of goods at all, and TALISK_HQ will not call that profit.

What is deliberately not in it

• Your platform and app subscriptions. The processing figure is payment processing only, which is what a processor deducts from a payout. Your monthly Shopify plan and your app charges arrive as bills, so they are in your profit and loss but not in this figure.
• Advertising and shipping are book-wide. TALISK_HQ does not split either one by sales channel, so if you advertise or ship for something other than the store, that spend is included here too. Both labels say "book-wide" so you can allow for it.
• Shopify charges with no line detail. A Shopify charge often bundles your subscription, your apps and your shipping labels into one amount. When TALISK_HQ cannot see the lines, it will not guess which part was shipping, so that charge stays out of the shipping figure. It tells you the amount and how many charges, right beside the shipping number, so you know what may be missing.
• Anything not yet in your ledger. Only posted sales count. A payout or a direct sale that has not been booked yet is excluded from this period and from the prior-period comparison, so the two sides always agree.

Sales paid outside a payout

Your storefront has two ways of getting paid, and both are counted as sales.

Most orders settle through a payout: the processor collects the money, deducts its fee, and deposits the rest. Some orders are paid at checkout another way, by e-transfer, cash, cheque or on delivery. Those are still storefront orders, and skipping the processor is often the point, since it saves the fee.

Both kinds are in Total Sales, in the order count, and in the tax figure. Only the payout kind is in Processing fees and Payout, because an order paid by e-transfer has no processor and never becomes a payout. That is why the fee percentage is measured against all your sales rather than only the ones that carried a fee.

One figure deliberately stays payout-only: the refund rate. A refund comes back through a payout, so counting sales that can never be refunded that way would water the rate down and show an improvement you did not earn.

Orders paid outside a payout have their own screen under Ecommerce, Externally-paid orders, where you match each one to the deposit that settled it.

A sale you invoiced outside the storefront is different again. That is an invoice, it lives in Invoicing, and it is not counted here.

The bar

Revenue is the full width. Each cost takes a slice, and what remains is the figure at the top. A cost you did not incur has no slice at all rather than an empty one, so the bar only ever shows real costs.

Refunds are already inside revenue: a refund reduces what you earned rather than counting as a separate cost, which is why you will not see a refunds slice.

Sales with no recorded cost

If you track product costs, a striped strip can appear under the bar reading something like $620.00 of product sales whose cost is not recorded. It is not a cost, and nothing is subtracted for it. It marks the part of the period's sales where TALISK_HQ does not know what the goods cost you, which is the part of the picture the cost of goods figure is missing.

It appears at any level of coverage. There is no threshold below which the screen stops telling you, because a cutoff would leave you unable to see how much was missing on either side of it. Beside it you get the share of sales that is costed and the same share for the previous period, so you can watch it improve.

An order counts as costed only when every product on it has a recorded cost. That is the same rule your cost of goods entry uses, so the two always agree. One uncosted extra on a large order puts that whole order into the strip, which looks severe but is honest: none of that order's cost reached your books.

Gift cards are never part of it. A gift card sells no goods, so it has no cost to record.

The fix is Ecommerce › Products › Missing costs, and the strip links straight to it. Enter a cost there and it fills in your past orders as well as your future ones.

Needs you

Only appears when something genuinely needs you:

• Orders paid but not fulfilled, once they are more than three days old, with the age of the oldest one. This reads order by order, so it covers Shopify and WooCommerce. Square has no order-level record, so Square sales cannot appear here.
• Products with no recorded cost, but only if you track product costs. Until you do, there is nothing for a missing cost to affect, so TALISK_HQ does not mention it.

The five numbers under the bar

Each one measures this period and shows the previous period beside it. None of them is coloured good or bad: a high shipping load is normal for some stores and a warning for others, and only you know which.

• Payment processing load. What the processor took, as a share of revenue. Payment processing only, so your plan and app charges are not in it.
• Shipping load. Carrier spend as a share of revenue, book-wide. It appears only when TALISK_HQ has carrier bills for the period. If it is missing, that means no carrier spend was recorded, not that you spent nothing.
• Refund rate. Refunds as a share of what you sold before refunds. Both sides leave sales tax out, so the two are comparable. This is a rate, not a cost: refunds are already inside revenue and are never subtracted twice.
• Sale to payout. The average number of days from an order being placed to the payout that carried it. Shopify tells TALISK_HQ which orders a payout settled, so this is measured on Shopify payouts.
• Repeat customers. The share of this period's orders placed by someone who had ordered before. Judged against the order history synced into TALISK_HQ, so a customer whose first purchase came before you connected the store reads as new.

A number TALISK_HQ cannot measure for the period is simply absent. You will never see a dash or a zero standing in for a figure that does not exist.

Money in flight

Payouts split into the ones already matched to a bank deposit and the ones still in transit. This is the question you would otherwise have to open Banking to answer. If something is in transit, Reconcile takes you straight there.

Comparing periods

Every headline carries the same figure for the previous period of the same length, because one number on its own says nothing. If there is no comparable prior period, TALISK_HQ says so rather than showing a percentage it cannot support.

When you last counted stock

On a book that tracks cost of goods, the headline also states when you last counted stock. Past a quarter, or if you have never recorded a count, TALISK_HQ stops presenting the headline as a settled figure and shows the age of the count instead. The figure itself is unchanged and still on screen: what is withdrawn is the claim, because a cost of goods nobody has checked against real stock is a number to read carefully. Record a count takes you to the right place, which is the Stock counts screen if you count your stock and Ledger › Setup if you use Shopify product costs.

On a book that counts, that count does more than hold the claim back. It is what puts cost of goods on the bar in the first place, so recording one is the difference between a headline that stops at After payment processing and one that ends and cost of goods.