Profit Metrics

Overview

Profit metrics tell you how much money you are actually keeping after all costs, fees, and expenses are accounted for. Dashboardly calculates three levels of profit -- Gross, Operating, and Net -- each giving you a progressively more complete picture of your TikTok Shop's financial health.

Metrics

Gross Profit

• What it shows: How much you earn after subtracting the cost of the products you sold, but before any other expenses (fees, commissions, shipping costs, etc.).
• Formula: Net Sales - COGS
• Where you see it: Dashboard, Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit, Product Details
• Example: You sell $5,000 worth of products (Net Sales) and those products cost you $2,000 to purchase (COGS). Your Gross Profit is $3,000. This means you have $3,000 to cover all your other expenses (fees, shipping, marketing, etc.).
• Important notes:
  • If Gross Profit equals Net Sales, you likely have not set your product costs. See Setting Up COGS.
  • Net Sales is product revenue after the applicable discounts in the selected report. Customer-paid shipping is separate and is not added to this base. Use the same shop, dates, timezone and accounting basis when comparing Net Sales and Gross Profit (see Revenue Metrics).
  • COGS includes the cost of cancelled orders that were shipped but not returned, because the product left your inventory.

Operating Profit

• What it shows: Your profit from store operations before ad spend. The selected accounting basis decides whether it is anchored to TikTok settlement activity or recognized from the orders sold in the selected period.
• Settlement basis: Start from what TikTok settles to you across order and non-order statement lines, then subtract costs TikTok does not handle, such as COGS and your manual expenses, and add manual income and reclaimable VAT where configured.
• Accrual basis: Build profit from the order-side revenue, shipping, fee, affiliate, refund, COGS, and manual-adjustment components earned by orders in the selected period. Any settlement reconciliation shown in this view is a reference only.
• Where the selected basis applies: Dashboard overview cards, Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit, Product Details
• Example (settlement basis): Imagine TikTok settles $2,400 to you across all order and statement lines. You then subtract $2,000 of product cost (COGS), $50 of sample costs, and $30 of manual expenses, and add $20 of manual income. Your Operating Profit is roughly $340.
• Important notes:
  • On Settlement basis, the fee, shipping, refund, and affiliate rows in the Profit & Loss breakdown explain what TikTok already deducted before paying you. They are not subtracted from the settlement anchor again.
  • Automatic per-unit seller shipping excludes unpaid orders with no payment, shipment or nonzero TikTok statement activity. An unpaid status alone does not remove a real shipping cost when payment, shipment or statement evidence is already present. Sample costs and manual shipping adjustments keep their own rules. Shop, Product and SKU reports use the same eligible physical quantities.
  • On Accrual basis, the visible order-side rows form the profit bridge. Settlement reconciliation is shown only for comparison and does not change Accrual Operating or Net Profit.
  • Product-attributed TikTok statement adjustments are shown as signed rows and included exactly once in Accrual profit. For example, a +$42 adjustment raises Operating Profit by $42; it does not also create a -$42 Other Profit Reconciliation. That separate row appears only when a genuine remaining difference still needs to be explained.
  • A complete TikTok statement response with no adjustment transactions means zero adjustments, not a failed Accrual proof. Dashboardly returns the full view to Settlement only when the source is unavailable, malformed, or does not reconcile.
  • On a filtered P&L, Other Product-attributed TikTok Adjustments shows the signed part of the exact selected Product/SKU statement total that is not already explained by the GMV-paid Ads child. Its selected-range total is conserved exactly; when several P&L periods are visible, Dashboardly distributes that remainder by the selected products’ sales so the Total still matches the Product/SKU attribution.
  • GMV-paid Ads is shown as a matched pair: the signed TikTok statement movement and, for a negative ad-payment charge, a positive GMV-paid Ads reclassification. Together they move only the amount already included in normal Ad Spend without creating extra profit or an Other Profit Reconciliation. A positive TikTok movement is a credit or reversal, so it stays visible but receives no positive reclassification. Dashboardly scopes the movement and Ad Spend separately for each product, verifies the independently calculated Ad Spend against P&L and Shop Summary, and then caps the negative cash-out overlap per product. The same per-product calculation is used for filtered and full-shop views, so one product cannot borrow unused Ad Spend capacity from another. P&L, CSV, Shop Summary, and product rows therefore use the same verified total without changing the unfiltered Ad Spend widget.
  • Opposite GMV-paid Ads movements from different products can cancel in a daily or monthly total. Dashboardly preserves the eligible reclassification for the negative cash-out, while the positive credit remains signed with no add-back, so a visible statement-movement total of $0 does not erase real product-level activity or create artificial profit.
  • In an Accrual Product/SKU view, if a filtered product has no sales in the selected range, Dashboardly allocates product-level marketing costs by the number of selected active SKUs in that product instead of inventing a revenue ratio. For example, one selected SKU in a four-SKU product receives one quarter of that product's marketing amount. Each product is calculated separately in a multi-product filter. Settlement keeps its established cash-view allocation.
  • Use the same date and accounting basis when comparing Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit, and Product Details. A change made on a report is personal to that page; authorized team members can change the account default under Settings > Reporting.
  • On Sales & Profit, Order date follows the selected accounting basis. Statement date switches the complete report to Settlement basis and groups finalized TikTok statement activity by the connected shop's Seller Center reporting calendar. Revenue, units, COGS, fees, refunds, shipping, affiliate costs, Operating Profit, Net Profit, margins, and ROI are all recalculated for that statement scope. Dashboardly uses official statement-header totals only after the exact matching transaction count and signed settlement amount have been verified; otherwise, the entire visible range stays on detailed transaction values so a newly published header cannot be combined with partial costs. Product and SKU rows reconcile back to the canonical shop totals rather than creating a separate product-only result. Export XLSX uses the same statement calendar and visible Product hierarchy, includes exact Product ID and SKU ID text columns for reliable spreadsheet grouping, keeps metric fields numeric, and preserves long TikTok identifiers without spreadsheet rounding. If the report changes while an export is being prepared, Dashboardly refreshes that hierarchy and retries once instead of downloading mixed-generation rows.
  • In the Sales & Profit SKU list, each SKU shows the same values as in its product's View SKUs breakdown and in Export XLSX. SKU rows add up to their product, and products add up to the shop totals. Searching the SKU list only hides rows; it never changes a SKU's values. For very large catalogs (more than 2,000 products or SKUs in the date range), a SKU in the list can differ slightly from its product breakdown.
  • Free samples do not have a TikTok payout. With Include sample costs enabled, their product cost and seller-funded shipping remain on the sample activity date in a Statement-date report. Any sample platform fee already included in TikTok's finalized settlement stays inside that settlement and is not deducted again as a separate sample expense. Profit & Loss, Sales & Profit, Product Overview, and each SKU breakdown use that same treatment, so the shop, product, and SKU totals remain comparable.
  • If Dashboardly cannot verify the complete TikTok statement attribution, independently confirm Net Ad Spend, or keep Operating Profit - Net Profit = Net Ad Spend on both Shop Summary and the complete product attribution, the whole Sales & Profit page returns to Settlement basis and shows a notice instead of mixing bases.
  • Dashboard overview cards use the applied reporting context shown above the cards. Match its dates, accounting basis and other financial filters before comparing with another report.
  • If Operating Profit is negative, the revenue recognized by the selected basis plus manual income is not covering your product and operating costs.
  • This measures whether the operations recognized by the selected reporting basis are profitable before Net Ad Spend. TikTok credits or adjustments already included in settlement are not extra income to add again.

Net Profit

• What it shows: Your final bottom-line profit after everything -- including your advertising spend -- under the selected accounting basis.
• Formula: Operating Profit - Net Ad Spend