Top 4 Reasons Why You Need a Profit-tracking App
As you cannot improve on what you don't measure, tracking all your profits, costs, and expenses is crucial. However, manual profit tracking is exhausting, error-prone, and a waste of time.
So, we need the profit tracker app hat joins the game. Not convincing enough? Keep scrolling to find out why a profit-tracking app is a must!
Why do you need a profit-tracking app?
To build a healthy, successful business, you should first track your business's performance. And this should be done on a daily basis, not weekly or monthly. By timely noticing all the abnormal ups and downs of your store's crucial metrics, you can optimize your marketing campaigns when it’s not too late.
However, chasing sales data up and down all day isn’t a good idea at any cost. It leaves you with no time for far-more-important things like order fulfillment, customer service, shipping, etc.
And that’s when you need a profit-tracking app to:
1. Know your store’s true profitability
2. Get rid of human errors
3. Save time on manual spreadsheets
4. Make data-backed decisions
#1. Know your store’s true profitability
How can you know how much money you’re making or losing when:
- Your supplier changes the product costs (COGS) every day based on your weight and quantity.
- You run ads on multiple channels like Facebook, Google, TikTok, Youtube, Amazon, etc.
- You have miscellaneous custom expenses like a 10% revenue commission for affiliate or agency fees that cost you $200 every three months and ‘insignificant’ fees like transaction fees, shipping fees, order fulfillment fees, customs duties, etc.
Without a profit-tracking app like TrueProfit to automatically track all your incomes and expenses, high chances are that you will always stay in the dark because manual tracking is just tiresome (we’ll talk about this later).
To know your true profit, you must process 10+ data spreadsheets yourself. Since this swallows a lot of your time and bores the sheets out of you, you repeat it reluctantly every once in a while.
Most of the time left, you just focus on pushing your revenues without knowing your revenue is big, but your costs can get even bigger.
For your better understanding, we discussed merchants’ irrational revenue obsession in this article: Revenue vs. Profit: How Focusing on Revenue Can Harm Your Dropshipping Business.
With a powerful profit-tracking app like TrueProfit, the app will automatically show you your real-time profits and losses without you having to lift a finger at it.
#2. Get rid of human errors
Imagine how manually aggregating and gathering data from more than 10 sources would make you or your employees reeling from the sheer amount of data.
If you have to gather data from too many spreadsheets and reports, you will likely make errors such as missing data and typos.
Once a metric gets miscalculated, the domino effect will happen. They have further effects, including inaccurate calculations of associated metrics and messed-up data, leading to misleading outcomes. The scary part is that you don't know about it. Or when you do, it's too late, and you can't trace where you messed up.
#3. Save time on manual spreadsheet updates
Even if the calculation and processing are error-free, you are losing your precious time manually collecting data from 10+ different sources to manually update your spreadsheets.
The amount of time wasted threatens your business's operations since you have spent too much time and energy on manual tracking instead of other things that matter. This includes promoting your online store, fulfilling orders, testing new products, taking care of your customers, and more.
The superiority of profit-tracking tools over spreadsheets is the speed and accuracy of calculations. As we mentioned above, even when you waste hours, miscalculations happen more often than you thought.
Not to mention that manual updating methods are hardly immediate, so all you get in the end could be data from the past.
Therefore, you can drastically save a lot of time by having an app to do all the boring, time-consuming profit-tracking tasks. This will leave you with much more time to scale up your business.
Manual updating methods aren’t immediate, which means you're relying on outdated numbers. Our Profit Margin Calculator helps you stay ahead with up-to-date profit calculations.
#4. Make data-backed decision
Last but not least, one valid reason why every business needs to have a profit-tracking app is that the right profit-tracking app will help you make the right and timely decisions.
For instance, besides store-width profits and losses, TrueProfit can show the detailed breakdowns of your customer and profit analytics, helping you focus more on customers and products that truly matter.
Get TrueProfit to Instantly Know your Real-time P&L
There are many profit-tracking apps on the market, and choosing the right one is the key to successfully understanding your business’ P&L. For that, you might love to try TrueProfit - a Shopify profit-tracking app trusted by thousands of merchants.
As its name suggests, TrueProfit will show you your true profit. But the best part is that it's in real time with automatic updates. This means you'll always stay on top of your business's financial health, knowing how much you are actually making or losing.
We know you're busy, so let's spend a minute taking a quick look at 6 features users love the most about TrueProfit:
1. Beautiful dashboard
See colorful graphs and charts depicting your Shopify store’s crucial metrics intuitively, like net profit, revenue, COGS, ad spends, etc.
2. All numbers from all data points
TrueProfit syncs data from all your ad channels, shipping platforms, etc., to guarantee all metrics are accurately calculated and automatically updated.
3. In-depth product insights
Know the profits and costs of every SKU and which products are most frequently bought together to run effective cross-sell campaigns, boosting your average order value.
4. Comprehensive customer profitability analysis
Focus on profitable customers with customer profitability metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), CAC, LTV:CAC ratio by traffic source, discount codes, countries, etc.
5. Advanced settings
Set up your COGS and shipping costs by location, quantity, weight, etc. This is impossible with Shopify Reports.
6. All-store view
Connect all your Shopify stores with TrueProfit and get a birds-eye view of all your stores' performance.
For that reason, you should try a paid app like TrueProfit to enjoy more functionalities. It only costs less than $20 per month but can ensure to provide you with desired results.
Overall, profit-tracking applications may save your business a great amount of money and time by improving your profit management efficiency.
Especially if you are having trouble keeping up with all the tasks involved in tracking your company’s profits in real time, install a profit-tracking app for your convenience now. Without a doubt, it will be beneficial!
Tracy Ng
Tracy Ng – Senior Content Executive at TrueProfit & SEO/Content Specialist Tracy is a senior content executive at TrueProfit - specializing in helping eCommerce businesses scale profitably through content. She has over 4 years of experience in eCommerce and digital marketing editorial writing. She develops high-impact content that helps thousands of Shopify merchants make data-driven, profit-focused decisions.
