Operations Console - Staging

• Invoiced revenue for each order shown, and net revenue — that figure less sales tax — which is what margin is calculated from
• Cost of goods — what ProfitMaker records against the order for drop-shipped items, stock items, freight and general-ledger items. Confirmed with ASI Computer Systems on 27 August 2026 and imported since. Orders with no cost recorded show no margin rather than a full one
• Production labor recorded in Time on Tasks (cutting, finishing, assembly, artwork, engraving, and similar floor tasks), costed at each contributor's rate
• Per-order administrative cost, where entered — nothing has been entered so far, so it is currently contributing nothing
• Actual postage paid to carriers vs. shipping charged to the customer
• Boxes & handling charged to the customer — added in ProfitMaker and carried through with each invoice

• How much of an order has been produced — some orders are billed in full when the order is placed and produced over the following weeks. Their recorded labor is a fraction of the labor they will eventually take, and ProfitMaker holds no field saying what fraction. They appear in this view as ready to ship, and their margin after labor is therefore too high. This is an open question with the office (the largest known gap in this view)
• Production time not yet logged — recorded hours understate true hours as tracking adoption grows
• QA / inspection labor and packing / fulfillment labor — not yet tracked (note the handling charge that offsets packing IS already collected, above)
• Order handling — order entry, quoting, customer communication
• Packaging supplies — the cost of boxes and fill (the charge for them is included above)
• General overhead — rent, utilities, equipment, insurance
• Payroll burden — employer taxes and benefits, if rates entered are base wages
• Waste, scrap, and remakes; payment processing fees

An order counts as ready to ship when it has an invoice and no shipment record against it. That is an absence, not a completion date, and ProfitMaker records no completion date we can read. So the test is doing something narrower than the name suggests, and it is worth knowing which way it errs.

Two quite different kinds of order sit in that group. Some were never going to ship at all — collected at the counter, delivered locally, or held as customer inventory — and for those, no shipment record is the permanent and correct resting state. They are genuinely finished. Others are billed in full when the order is placed and produced over the following weeks; those are not finished, and counting them as complete makes the labor look lighter than it will finally be.

Telling the two apart takes an answer from the people who run the process, and that question is open. Until it is settled, read this view as orders that are invoiced and have been worked on, rather than as orders that are done.

Between 21 and 28 August this report showed no margin at all. The figure it had shown before that was between 91 and 99 percent, and it was never a margin: it was the amount billed less recorded labor, with the entire cost of goods missing from the calculation. That number was challenged in July and the challenge was correct.

The missing piece has since been recovered. ProfitMaker had recorded a cost of goods against each order all along, in fields whose meaning was ambiguous enough that three defensible readings of them differed by a factor of three. ASI Computer Systems, who write ProfitMaker, identified the right ones on 27 August. Those costs are now imported, so the margin here is a real gross margin: net revenue less cost of goods, divided by net revenue.

Two things to hold on to when reading it. The margin is calculated only across orders that carry a cost of goods — an order with none shows a dash rather than a flattering number, because a missing cost is not a zero cost. And gross margin does not include labor: the margin after labor is shown beside it, and that one is a ceiling that will fall as more work gets clocked and as the production question above is settled.

We report what we know, we say plainly what we do not, and this list gets shorter from here.