18 answers
Reading your P&L
What each line means, which day an amount belongs to, and why a number moved.
- What are CM1, CM2 and CM3?Three contribution margins, each subtracting one kind of cost.
- Which day does a refund belong to?The day the refund was issued, for both the revenue and the cost credited back.
- Why does nouz say my CM1 is overstated?Because something you sold has no unit cost.
- How is VAT handled?Everything down to the tax line is VAT inclusive, the way you read your own shop.
- Which lines can I expand, and what is inside?Seven of them.
- How do I compare two periods?Pick a range and a granularity, and the statement renders a column per period: days, weeks, months or years, side by side, with a change column between them.
- Can I look at an arbitrary date range?Yes.
- Why does my P&L differ from Shopify's numbers?Because they answer different questions.
- Can I export the statement itself?Yes, from Settings and then Data export, with the column granularity you want: daily, weekly, monthly or one total column.
- Why does the export ask about number format?Because European Excel and most analysis tools want opposite things.
- What is in the daily profit email?Yesterday, computed by the same engine the app uses: net revenue, the contribution margins, and what the day actually left after fixed costs.
- What is on each Insights tab?Ten tabs: revenue with the bridge from gross to net, products with per-SKU profitability, marketing with MER, POAS and blended CAC, returns economics, customers with repeat purchase, order cadence and purchase journeys, lifetime value by cohort in revenue and contribution terms, and one tab for each of the four cost engines.
- How does the product profitability view work?It runs the statement's own logic per product: revenue, discounts, returns, goods and the margin that survives them, so the catalogue can be ranked by what it keeps rather than by what it sold.
- What do the data health flags mean?Each one names a place where a number would otherwise be a guess: products without a unit cost, orders whose parcels have no weight, destinations no shipping zone claims, markets with no EPR rate entered, and ad sources that are not connected.
- Why are there two average order values?Because they answer different questions.
- One day shows a negative margin. Is that a bug?Usually not.
- Why is every percentage against net revenue?So they can be compared and added.
- How should I read the margin waterfall?Top down, as four questions rather than four numbers.
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