Before it opens
Finance asks for your business’s name and country first, under Settings, then Business. Every statement it makes says whose it is. Invoicing does not wait for this.Making a report
Reports is your profit and your books for a period, in five tabs: Profit, Profit and Loss, Sales by Country, Payment Methods, and Tax Collected if the store collected tax. Pick a period and press Generate Report: it reads every order in the period, so it can take a moment, and fills every tab at once. The page keeps the last report you made and opens on it, saying what it covers and when it was made. Picking another period changes nothing until you press the button again. Something that changes the figures afterwards, such as a payment fee rate or a cost used for past sales, is in the report once you make it again, and the page says so until you do. A store makes up to 20 reports every 10 minutes. That counts Generate Report, the Downloads and the reports the API answers.What counts
- An order counts in the period it was placed.
- Only a completed order is a sale. A pending, cancelled or refunded one is not.
- A sale is what the buyer paid: at the sale price it was on, after its coupon and any affiliate link’s discount, with the payment method’s fee they were charged. A variant’s own price is never used.
- Money is in your store’s currency.
- Tax you collected is not income. It is left out of every sale on these pages and reported by itself.
Profit
Net Profit is what is left of your sales after four things:
The Profit tab of Reports shows Net Profit, Margin, Profit per Order and Break-Even, your sales and profit by month, where the money went, and each product’s own figures.
Expenses
An expense is money your business spent: a payee, an amount, a date, a category, and a receipt if you have one.
Categories are yours to add, rename and sort. Payment fees are not a category, on purpose: they are already taken off your profit, and an expense for them would count them twice.