Reporting Methodology

By the Numbers counts the value of the orders your customers place, minus the money you refund to them.

How It Works

Reports that show Total Sales work it out the same way:

Total Sales = Gross Sales − Discounts + Shipping + Tax − Returns

Gross Sales is each item’s price times its quantity, before anything else is taken off or added.
Discounts are the discounts Shopify records on the order.
Shipping and Tax are what the customer was charged for them. If your prices include tax, Gross Sales already contains it, so it isn’t added again.
Returns are the money you refunded, which shows as Total Returned in reports.

Duties aren’t part of Total Sales.

Which Orders Count

Canceled orders don’t count, and neither do their refunds. If you cancel an order later, it drops out of the period it was placed in.
Orders whose payment was voided or expired don’t count.
Pending, authorized and partly paid orders count, as soon as they’re placed.
Fully refunded orders count as sales on the date they were placed. Their refund lowers sales on the date you refunded it. Orders Fulfillment Status is the one report that leaves them out.
Test orders are never imported, so they never appear.
Orders from every sales channel count, including point of sale. Use the Sales Channel filter on a report to look at one.

Reports use the latest version of each order. An edit or a cancellation can therefore change a past period’s numbers the next time you open the report.

When Sales and Returns Count

A sale counts on the date the order was placed, in your store’s time zone.
A return counts on the date you refunded the money, not on the date of the original order. A sale in January refunded in February lowers February’s Total Sales.

The refund is the amount that actually went back to the customer, including any shipping and tax you refunded. A restocking fee you keep isn’t subtracted, because that money never went back.

In Total Sales, the P&L and the profit reports, refunds on orders placed more than 730 days before the start of your date range don’t count.

Gift Cards

A gift card counts as a sale when a customer buys it, at its full price. When it’s later spent, the order it pays for counts as a sale too. Over the life of a gift card, its value shows up in your sales twice: once when sold, and again when spent.

Currency

Every amount is in your store’s currency. When a customer pays in another currency, By the Numbers uses the store-currency amounts Shopify records for that order and refund.

What It Means for You

These rules aren’t the same as the ones in Shopify’s own reports, so your totals in By the Numbers can differ from Shopify’s. An order counts in full when it’s placed, for example, even if the customer hasn’t paid all of it yet.

Net Sales and Item Net Sales are 2 different figures:

Net Sales, in Total Sales and the other sales reports, is Total Sales without tax added on top. If your prices include tax, it still contains the tax.
Item Net Sales is Gross Sales minus Discounts, with no shipping or returns.

Item Net Sales appears in Products Sold and its by-vendor, by-tag and by-collection versions. It also appears in the profit-by reports, Discount Code Profitability, Unit Cost Coverage, Product Journey, the P&L product tables, Top Products and the product page.

Gross Profit has 3 names, one for each starting point:

On the P&L, Gross Profit is Net Revenue less COGS.
On Profit & Margin and Contribution After Ad Spend, Gross Profit (Total Sales) is Total Sales less COGS.
On the profit-by reports and Discount Code Profitability, Item Gross Profit is Item Net Sales less COGS.

The margins follow the same names: Gross Margin, Gross Margin (Total Sales) and Item Gross Margin. The 3 figures differ because shipping, tax and returns are in some starting points and not others.

Three more figures carry their own names. The das Pixel session reports show Gross Profit (Order Revenue): the revenue of the matched order less unit cost, counted only on orders where every unit has a cost.

Advertising shows Attributed Gross Profit on its products card. Stores Like Yours shows Gross Margin (Order Total), which uses order totals before refunds.

Contribution Profit is split the same way. On the P&L it also takes off the costs you entered. Contribution After Ad Spend shows Contribution Profit (Total Sales), which is Gross Profit (Total Sales) less Ad Spend and leaves those costs out.

Net Revenue, on the P&L, can leave out tax or shipping. Set this with Include taxes in revenue and Include shipping in revenue, under Revenue Calculation on the Reports tab of Preferences. These settings never change Total Sales.

Because refunds count on their own date, a period with many returns can show low or even negative sales. That’s the money actually leaving your store that period, not an error.

Total Sales: the report that breaks your sales into these parts.
How Often Is My Data Updated?: when new orders and refunds reach your reports.
How to Use Advanced Filters: narrow a report to the orders you care about.