Why your profit numbers are wrong.

Most profit dashboards work the same way: take Shopify revenue, subtract ad spend from the ad platforms, then subtract product, shipping and fee costs based on settings you entered. It's fast and it's useful. But it's an estimate, and it never gets checked against the one source that can't be wrong: your bank.

1. Product costs go stale

You set a product's cost once. Then your supplier changes prices, reprints happen, shipping from the supplier goes up, or a bulk order comes in cheaper. The dashboard keeps using the old number. Reconciled books use the supplier's actual charges.

2. Payment fees aren't a flat percentage

Card fees vary by card type, country and currency conversion. A flat 2.9% + 30¢ assumption drifts on every international or premium-card order. The actual fee for every transaction is in your payment processor's records.

3. Refunds and chargebacks land late

A chargeback can arrive weeks after the sale, with its own fee, and sometimes the money comes back if you win. Estimates often count refunds at a guessed rate or on the wrong date, which makes months look better or worse than they were.

4. Costs that never touch Shopify or the ad platforms

Software subscriptions, contractors, bank fees, shipping supplies, loan repayments, the accountant. They're real costs every month, and they only show up in your bank and card statements. If nobody typed them into the dashboard, they're missing.

5. Ad spend vs what you were billed

Ad platforms report spend by day. Your card is charged on billing thresholds, sometimes with taxes and credits. The two rarely line up within a month unless someone matches them.

6. Currency conversion

Sell in USD, get paid out in CAD? The payout rate isn't the rate the dashboard assumed. Over a year, small conversion differences add up.

7. Nothing checks the answer

This is the root cause. An estimate has no feedback loop. If any assumption is off, nothing tells you, until the bank balance doesn't match the story, or your accountant's year-end numbers come in lower.

The fix: books, reconciled

The only way to get profit you can trust is to build it from what actually happened: every order, fee, refund, payout, bank and card transaction, booked into real double-entry accounts and reconciled to your statements. When the books tie to the bank, the profit is real.

That's what Metreks does automatically. It keeps the books for you, checks them against your bank every day, and shows profit you can make decisions on. See how Metreks calculates profit.