> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.shoply.gg/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Finance > What your store took in, what it cost, and what is left: expenses, profit and the books The **Finance** group of the dashboard keeps your store's books: **Expenses**, **Reports**, **Tax** and **Invoicing**. This page is the first two. [Tax at checkout](/guides/tax.md) has a page of its own, and invoices are with [orders](/guides/orders.md#invoices). ## 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](#with-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: | | | | - | - | | **Cost of Goods** | What a sale costs you. Type a cost on a variant, as an amount or as a percent of what it sold for, which is what the buyer paid for it after any sale and discount. It is written onto each order as it is paid, so changing a cost later does not rewrite earlier months unless you say to use it for past sales too. | | **Payment Fees** | What your payment providers keep. Shoply does not read these from a provider: they are worked out from the rates you type under **Payment Fees**, and every place the figure shows carries a mark saying it can be slightly off. | | **Affiliate Commission** | What your [affiliates](/guides/affiliates.md) earned on the period's sales. When an order is refunded, what came back off the affiliate's balance is taken off again; what they had already been paid stays a cost. | | **Expenses** | What you recorded under **Expenses**. | 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. | | | | - | - | | **By hand** | Add one whenever you pay for something. | | **Recurring** | A bill that comes round every month or year. It can add itself on the day, or ask you first. Pause one and nothing is added or asked until you resume it. | | **Imported** | A statement from your bank, as a file. Say how its dates are written and whether it lists only money going out. | | **Rules** | A rule files an expense that arrives with no category, by words in the payee's name. | 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. ## The books The other tabs of **Reports** are the books for a period: **Net Sales**, **Gross Profit**, **Expenses** and **Net Profit**, over the profit and loss, where your buyers were, what each payment method took in, and the orders that carried tax by place and rate. **Downloads** gives you the same as files for whoever does your accounts, for the period the report covers. The profit and loss starts from gross sales, at the prices before any sale, and takes off what your sales, discounts (coupons and affiliate links), refunds and chargebacks took, each on a line of its own. Affiliate commission is a cost of sales beside payment fees, and the transactions file has a row for each order's commission. ## With the API See [Get profit](/api-reference/finance/get-profit.md) and [Get the books](/api-reference/finance/get-the-books.md), [List expenses](/api-reference/expenses/list-expenses.md) and [Create an expense](/api-reference/expenses/create-an-expense.md), and for categories, recurring expenses and rules, [expense setup](/api-reference/expense-setup/list-expense-categories.md). This documentation is built and hosted on [Mintlify](https://mintlify.com), a developer documentation platform.