Your store knows what it sold. It does not know what it earned.
The platform tells you what you sold. It does not tell you what it cost once returns, shipping and marketplace fees have landed — so a good month on the dashboard can be a flat month in the books.
Sound familiar?
If none of these are your business, this probably is not the page for you — and we would rather you found that out here than on a call.
- 01
Shopify says you did 2.4 million this month. You still cannot say what was left after returns, courier charges and ad spend.
- 02
The website says eleven in stock. The store room has seven, and nobody knows when that happened.
- 03
The courier remits a lump sum every Friday and somebody matches it to orders by hand.
Marketplace payouts against the real cost of goods.
What you will be looking at
The screens this trade lives in
Every one of these exists today. Nothing here is something we would build for you later — that part has its own heading further down.
Sales
Shopify orders arrive with their fees, discounts and returns already on them.
Inventory
Weighted-average cost carried on every unit, so the margin on the screen is the real one.
Ad spend
What Meta and Google took this month, set against what the channel actually returned.
Courier
Cash-on-delivery remittances matched to the orders they settle, not to a total.
Scan & upload
Photograph a supplier bill from the phone; it comes back coded and ready to approve.
Reports
The profit and loss the platform dashboard cannot produce, because it never saw your costs.
What it already does
About the hard part
- Weighted-average cost carried on every sale
- Returns that reverse the sale and the stock together
- Payouts reconciled against the bank, not assumed
Usually built on top
A payout import shaped to the marketplaces you actually sell on, and a contribution report per channel.
Scoped and quoted in writing before anything is built, and it ships into your own books — so a custom report reconciles to the statutory ones rather than disagreeing with them.
How custom work fits in →Not quite your trade?
The ledger underneath is the same one. What changes is the costing, the chart of accounts and which screens you open first.
Bring a bill you have not entered yet
We photograph it on the call and you watch the draft entry come back. It is a better demonstration than anything we could write here.