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Quick start

The shortest whole loop: one costed product, one order, one profit figure. Do it on a test store, or with a product and an order that do not matter, so that you see how a figure is made before you trust it with the ones that do.

Install it first, and log out and back in; see requirements and install.

1. Switch it on

Open Profitability → Settings. On the General tab, tick Status and save. Until you do, nothing is recorded, and an order placed while it is off never gets figures of its own.

While you are there, look at the Orders tab. The statuses ticked under Counted order statuses are the ones whose orders count as a sale: Complete, Shipped and Processing, unless your store has changed them. Leave them for now.

2. Cost one product

Open a product under Catalog → Products. In the Price section of the Data tab there is a Cost field, labelled in your store's default currency. Type what the product costs you and save the product.

An empty field means not costed. 0 means the goods really are free.

3. Place an order and move it to a counted status

Place an order for that product in the storefront, or add one under Sales → Orders. Then give it the status Complete from the order's history.

The order is recorded the moment it reaches a status, and counts while that status is one you ticked in step 1.

4. Read the figure

Open Profitability → Dashboard. The period is the last 30 days unless you change it. Where the money went takes the order's revenue, ex-tax, down through cost of goods, discounts, payment fees, fulfilment and returns to contribution margin.

Payment fees and fulfilment read zero, because you have written no rules yet. The Not configured yet panel names the payment and shipping methods the order used, which is the list to work through next. Net profit reads as a dash until an expense covers the period.

Open Profitability → Product profit and click the product, then the order, to see the same figure broken down line by line.

5. Watch it move

Set the order's status to Canceled and reload the dashboard. The order stops counting straight away, because whether an order counts is read from its status every time a screen loads. Put it back to Complete and it counts again, at the cost recorded when it was first placed.

Now change the product's cost and reload. Nothing moves: a recorded line keeps its cost. That is the promise the rest of the extension is built on; see the cost is frozen.

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