Methodology
Economic reconstruction
A dashboard shows you numbers. A reconstruction shows you where the money went, one deduction at a time, with the evidence behind each step — and stops at the point where the evidence stops.
Operator-led · Read-only Shopify access
The problem
A correct number can still be misleading
Most reporting tools display revenue and margin, and the figures are usually right. The difficulty is that each one is a single measurement taken out of a chain. Revenue alone does not tell you whether tax has been removed. A margin alone does not tell you which products it was computed over, or whether the products without recorded costs were quietly excluded from the denominator.
Reconstruction rebuilds the chain instead of sampling it. Every figure is derived from the one above it by a stated deduction, so the reader can see not only what the business kept but exactly where it stopped keeping it.
The ladder
From gross sales to whatever the evidence reaches
- Gross sales
- Order totals as Shopify records them, already net of discounts, including tax and shipping charged to the customer.
- Less tax
- Collected on behalf of a government. It was never the merchant's money, so it comes out before anything is called sales.
- Net sales excluding tax
- The first figure that represents money the business actually took.
- Less refunds
- Reduced by the period's effective tax rate, because the tax portion of a refunded order was never the merchant's either.
- Sales after refunds
- What survived returns.
- Less cost of goods
- Each sale costed at the unit cost in force on its order date, not at today's cost.
- Gross profit
- Sales after refunds less cost of goods — before advertising and before every cost below.
- Less advertising
- Spend from the connected advertising accounts for the same period.
- Contribution after advertising
- NOT profit. It excludes payment fees, fulfilment, duties and overhead.
- Less payment fees · fulfilment · overhead
- Usually unavailable: these are not in Shopify's order data and are not inferred from a benchmark.
- Net profit
- Reported as not calculable whenever the costs above it are unavailable.
The last two rungs are dashed because they usually cannot be completed. That is the honest result for most Shopify stores, not a limitation being apologised for — and it is the difference between a diagnostic and a number generator.
Definitions
Four figures that are routinely confused
These are not interchangeable, and a great deal of bad ecommerce decision-making comes from treating them as though they were.
Revenue
What customers paid. It says nothing about what the business kept. A store can grow revenue substantially while keeping less of every pound than it did before.
Gross profit
Sales after refunds, less the cost of the goods sold. It answers whether the products themselves make money, before anything is spent acquiring the customer.
Contribution after advertising
Gross profit less advertising spend. This is the figure most often mistaken for profit. It excludes payment fees, fulfilment, duties and every fixed cost, so it is always higher than profit and frequently much higher.
Net profit
What remains after every cost. Autopsify reports it only when the costs above it are actually present in the evidence. When they are not, the Blueprint says not calculable and names which inputs are missing.
The boundary
Why 'not calculable' is a real answer
Payment processing fees, fulfilment and shipping costs, duties and overhead are generally not present in Shopify's order data. A tool that reports net profit anyway has either been given those figures by the merchant or has assumed them. Assumption is the common case, and it is invisible in the output.
The consequence is not a rounding difference. Treating an unavailable cost as zero makes the business look more profitable than it is, by precisely the amount nobody measured — and the error compounds through every figure below it. Autopsify withholds the figure and states the reason instead. Where a merchant can supply the missing costs, the ladder extends; where they cannot, it stops and says so.
The classification behind each rung — known, supported or unknown — is what makes the boundary auditable, and measurement coverage is what decides whether a rung covers enough of the business to carry a conclusion at all.
Methodology
The rest of the method
See the ladder for your store
£497 for one diagnostic cycle, with the arithmetic beside every figure and an explicit note wherever the data cannot answer.