Counted
An order whose payment status is paid, partially paid, partially refunded, refunded.
Methodology
Every number on this page is one you can check.
Cleartill shows profit after tracked costs. Tracked is a real word with a real boundary: it means the costs Shopify reports, the costs you enter, and nothing else. This page is exactly where that boundary sits, so you never have to guess whether a figure includes something it does not.
The calculation
Eight lines, in this order
This is the whole formula. There is no ninth line held back, and nothing is weighted or smoothed.
- Revenue
- What your products sold for before any discount, excluding tax and excluding shipping. This is the same figure Shopify Analytics calls gross sales.
- minus Discounts
- Every discount applied, whether by code or automatically.
- minus Refunds
- Refunded amounts excluding tax, counted on the day the refund happened rather than the day of the sale.
- minus Product cost
- The unit cost of what sold. Yours when your catalog carries one; filled in and marked when it does not.
- minus Payment fees
- The real per-order fee once your payouts report it, 2.9% plus 30¢ an order until then.
- minus Shipping cost
- Your own flat per-order shipping rate, times the orders that day. Zero until you set one.
- plus Shipping charged
- What your customers paid you for shipping. Kept as its own line, never netted against the cost above.
- minus Ad spend
- What you spent to get the orders, from the figure you enter each day or from a connected ad account where that is available.
What is left is your profit after tracked costs. Every figure is held in whole cents, so nothing drifts by rounding, and a day is your shop’s day in your shop’s timezone. Change that timezone and every stored day is re-derived.
The boundary
What this number does not include
These are real costs of running your store. Cleartill has no way to see them, so it does not pretend to, and it does not quietly assume a figure for them either.
- Rent, salaries, and anything you pay a person
- Software you subscribe to, including Cleartill
- Income tax, and any tax that is not collected on the order itself
- Warehousing and the cost of holding stock
- The labour of packing, picking, and handling returns
- Chargeback amounts themselves, though the fee a chargeback incurs is counted once your payouts report it
This is why the number is not called net profit. Net profit is what is left after everything, including the things above. If you want that figure, take your profit after tracked costs and subtract your overheads yourself. Cleartill would rather name the gap than paper over it.
Inclusion
Which orders count, and on which day
An order counts when its payment was actually captured. What happened to the order afterwards does not change that.
Not counted
An order whose payment status is authorized, pending, voided, expired. Money was never captured, so there was no sale. Test orders are excluded too.
A cancelled order still counts if you were paid. Cancelling an order does not un-happen the sale. The revenue stays on the day it sold and the refund reverses it on the day the refund was issued, which is what your bank statement will show you too.
Refunds land on the refund’s own day. Not the day of the original sale. A quiet day with a large refund on it can therefore show a loss, and that is the honest reading: it is the day the money left.
Tax is neither revenue nor cost. You collected it to pass it on, so it is not in your revenue and not in your costs. It appears in one place only, in the base your processor charges its fee on, because processors charge on the full amount the customer paid.
Provenance
Which figures are real and which are filled in
Wherever Cleartill fills a blank, it says so on the number itself rather than in a footnote you have to find.
Payment fees
2.9% plus 30¢ an order to begin with. Grant the optional payments permission and Cleartill reads the real fee your processor charged on each order, including the fee on a chargeback or dispute, and books it to the day of the sale rather than the day the payout landed. On any other processor the estimate is what you get, because no one reports the real figure to us.
Product cost
A cost you typed, or one already on the product in Shopify, is treated as fact and is never overwritten by anything automatic. Where a variant has never had a cost, Cleartill fills one in and marks it, and you can correct it in one edit. A catalog with no costs at all produces a number that is far too flattering, which is precisely when the marking matters most.
Shipping and ads
Both are yours. Shipping cost is the flat per-order rate you set, applied to every order, and it is zero until you set one. Ad spend is the figure you enter for the day, or one imported from a connected ad account where that is available. Spend only: no campaigns, no creatives, no audiences.
Any figure with something filled in carries a small tag next to it. That tag is rendered from the data, not written by hand, so a fully costed and fully reconciled store correctly shows no tag anywhere. If you see one, something in that number is ours rather than yours.
Contact
A number here does not match yours?
That is worth an email, and it is the kind we most want to get. Tell us the figure you expected and the one you saw, and a person will work out which of us is wrong.