Which KPIs belong on your online store's dashboard?

An online store dashboard should show what is left, not only what comes in. Revenue and bank balance say only so much. Next to revenue belong the gross margin, the gross margin after order costs, the shipping costs per order and the number of orders, and with every figure the share of your revenue it covers. The hard part is not the chart, but the data underneath.

The KPIs and how to calculate them

• Revenue = the revenue of your order lines, excluding VAT
• Gross margin = revenue − cost of goods, as a percentage of the revenue whose cost price is known
• Gross margin after order costs = gross margin − shipping costs + shipping revenue − other order costs (how to calculate gross margin per order)
• Shipping costs per order = your carrier’s invoice lines per order, excluding VAT (how to calculate what shipping costs)
• Number of orders and average order value = revenue ÷ number of orders
• Coverage = the share of your revenue whose cost price is known

That last one tells you whether you can trust the others. A margin over part of your revenue is something else than a margin over all of it.

Why a dashboard can give a good-looking wrong number

A dashboard calculates with what you put in. We came across these three cases in the monthly figures of an e-commerce business.

1. A shifted decimal. One monthly export arrived with every number ten times too large. Discounts and refunds were ten times too high and pushed the monthly margin down. It was visible, but it did not look impossible. A shifted decimal does not produce nonsense; it produces a believable wrong report.

2. Empty silently became zero. A surcharge depended on a category field, and on part of the lines that field was empty. There the surcharge silently became zero. Every field that drives money needs a meaning for empty: truly zero, unknown, or not applicable.

3. The dashboard did not match the accounts. Revenue in the books was lower than in the orders, partly because marketplace commission was booked net and the booking date was not the shipping date. None of those differences was an error. A reconciliation is done when every difference falls into a named category, not when the difference is zero.

How Sento does it

• Everything in one place. Orders, costs, payouts and hours in a single database, so your whole organisation works from the same number.
• Check first, calculate after. Sento reads your columns and says what it is unsure about. What it cannot prove, it asks you, rather than quietly filling something in.
• From the systems you already have. Order systems, carriers, payment providers, accounting and marketplaces, from Shopify and Magento to PostNL, Mollie and Exact Online.
• Dashboards that are ready. An overview, a margin report, logistics and finance, and you build your own dashboards.
• Empty is not zero. If data is missing, the figure says which share of your revenue it covers.
• Every amount clicks through. For every number you see which file and which line it came from.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a KPI dashboard and a report from your accounts?

Your accounts follow the booking date and the general ledger; a dashboard follows your orders and shipments. That is why they differ, for example when a marketplace commission is booked net or an order is booked in a different month than it shipped. That is not an error, as long as every difference has a name.

Can I not just use Power BI or a spreadsheet?

For the chart, yes. The work is in the data underneath. Merging exports every month, removing duplicate lines and establishing per file whether an amount includes VAT becomes a full day nobody wants.

What does the coverage next to a figure mean?

Which share of your revenue the figure covers. If the cost price of part of your orders is missing, Sento calculates the margin over the rest and says how large that share is. A gap never silently becomes a zero.

Which systems can I connect?

Any package that can export, via CSV or Excel. On top of that there are connections that fetch your data themselves, so your overview stays current without you doing anything.