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.

Why it does not say "profit"

Because it usually 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 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.

What is deliberately not in it

• Shipping. Not in the figure yet. It is coming.
• 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 is book-wide. TALISK_HQ does not split ad spend by sales channel, so if you advertise for something other than the store, that spend is included here too. The label says "book-wide" so you can allow for it.
• Anything not yet in your ledger. Only posted payouts count. A payout that has not been booked yet is excluded from this period and from the prior-period comparison, so the two sides always agree.

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.

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.

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.