Read a profit report
A profit report answers a harder question than it looks like it does. Revenue is known the moment an order ships, but almost nothing else is: the marketplace reports what it charged you days or weeks later, your own cost for the unit comes from your records rather than the channel, and a refund can land in a month the sale did not. So a profit figure is assembled from sources that arrive at different times and settle at different rates.
The reports are built so that you can always tell how finished a number is. That is what the basis and the fee-source markers are for, and reading them is the difference between a figure you can price against and one that is still moving.
How settled a profit figure is, where each fee amount came from, and which day a refund counts against.
Terms
Actual profit
Profit calculated with the fees the marketplace actually charged you, once they're settled.
Partial settlement
Profit calculated with a mix of settled and estimated fees — part of this figure has settled, part could still change.
Estimated profit
Profit recalculated with our own fee estimates instead of the marketplace's, so you have a figure before fees settle.
No fee data
No marketplace fee data has arrived yet, not even an estimate. Profit is shown with zero fees, so it reads too high.
Settled fee
The fee amount the marketplace actually charged you, reported once its settlement report closes.
Financial-events estimate
A preliminary fee figure from the marketplace's financial-events feed, reported for your order before settlement finalizes it.
Order-charges estimate
A preliminary fee estimate the marketplace attaches to your order, before it reports the settled amount.
Estimated fee rate
A modeled rate calculated from your own settled fees, used only until the marketplace reports the real one.
Refunds on the order's day
A refund counts against the day its order sold — a shirt sold Aug 20 and refunded Sep 10 shows $0 on Aug 20.
Refunds on the day they happened
A refund counts on the day it landed — that same shirt shows the sale on Aug 20 and the refund on Sep 10.
Where to start
Open the daily report first and look at the basis on the most recent few days. Those are the days still settling, and they are where an unexpectedly good number usually turns out to be an unexpectedly incomplete one. The catalog report reads the same way, with the same money columns.
The dimension reports add one thing: because each of their rows covers a set of orders rather than a single day or product, they carry a Profit basis column of their own. A row there reads as partial whenever its orders disagree, which is not the same as the whole row being unsettled — see Profit basis.
If a figure looks wrong, the fastest check is its cost. An order with no unit cost behind it reports its whole margin as profit, which is the single most common cause of a report that reads too well — see COGS source kind.