Lifetimely: Income Statement
Income Statement
At a glance
The Income Statement (also known as a profit and loss statement) in Lifetimely is a powerful tool for tracking your store's financial performance. It provides insights into your revenue, costs, and profitability—helping you make data-driven decisions to optimize your ecommerce business.
Availability and data freshness
Availability and prerequisites: Available for Shopify and Amazon store contexts. Accurate profit requires product, shipping, handling, transaction, marketing, and operating-cost setup; connected QuickBooks accounts can replace selected custom COGS, marketing, personnel, or operating expense categories. See the Profit & Loss data contract and shop calculation profiles.
Freshness and history: QuickBooks labels state an approximately six-hour import cadence. The fallback range starts on the first day of the month six months ago and ends yesterday; a stored range can override it.
Use the report controls
Open Profit & loss > Income Statement (/profit_and_loss/income_statement). The initial range starts on the first day of the month six months ago and ends yesterday; the report remembers a previously selected range.
Filters available on this page
The current Income Statement UI provides time controls rather than product, customer, order, or country filters:
- Time period: Choose custom dates or a preset: Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, Last 365 Days, This Month, Last Month, Last 6 Months, This Quarter, Last Quarter, This Year, or Last Year.
- Compare to: Choose Previous period, Previous month to date, Previous quarter to date, Previous period aligned by day of week, Same period in the prior year, Prior year aligned by day of week, or Custom period. Month-to-date and quarter-to-date are available only when the main range starts at the corresponding period boundary.
- Comparison time period: Choose the comparison dates when Compare to is set to Custom period. This control is otherwise read-only.
- Timeframe: Group the selected period into Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, or Yearly columns.
The page does not currently expose complex report filters. Your store-wide prefilters, timezone, display currency, platform, and shop calculation profile are applied automatically from your store context and settings. Change or verify those outside the Income Statement before reconciling results.
Other features available on this page
- Summary cards: Review Total Sales, Marketing Costs, COGS, and Net Profit for the full period, including percentage change from the comparison period. Use each information icon for a definition; the Marketing Costs tooltip also shows spend by connected platform and custom costs.
- Interactive chart: Compare Total sales, Marketing costs, COGS, and Net profit over time. Turn Show comparison on to add the comparison period, switch between bar and line charts, or select legend items to hide or reveal individual series.
- Breakdown views: Switch between the period-by-period list and summary tiles. In list view, expand Total sales, Amazon fees (Amazon only), COGS, Marketing, and Operating expenses, use row tooltips for definitions, and reverse the date-column order. A QuickBooks logo identifies applicable rows supplied by QuickBooks.
- CSV export: Download the breakdown for the active date range and timeframe.
- Ask AI: If your account includes the Profit Agent feature, use Ask AI to ask questions with the current date range, timeframe, chart type, comparison visibility, and view mode as context.
- Setup guidance: The Centralize my data panel links to integrations, product and operating-cost setup, and scheduled email or Slack reports, and includes a short Income Statement onboarding video. The panel may be dismissed after setup.
Data contract: what goes into each number
Every Income Statement value is determined by three things: the data Lifetimely receives from your connected sources, the orders included by your report filters, and your store's calculation settings.
Where the data comes from
| Income Statement rows | Data used |
|---|---|
| Sales, discounts, refunds, taxes, duties, orders, and customer counts | Shopify or Amazon orders and refunds that remain after store-wide prefilters. The current Income Statement page does not add complex report filters. |
| Product, shipping, handling, transaction, and fulfillment costs | Imported commerce data and costs configured in Lifetimely. When more than one cost source is available, the shop calculation profile explains which source takes priority. |
| Marketing | Spend from connected ad platforms, limited by any selected ad accounts or campaign exclusions. |
| Operating expenses and other custom costs | Costs configured in Lifetimely. Connected QuickBooks accounts can supply selected COGS, marketing, personnel, or operating expense categories instead. |
| Amazon fees | Amazon financial-event and fee data, shown only for Amazon stores. |
A missing cost or disconnected source normally contributes zero; Lifetimely does not estimate it unless you configured a fallback such as a default product margin. This means incomplete cost, ad, or accounting data can make profit appear too high.
How dates and settings affect the result
- Orders are placed in a period using their processing date and your selected timezone.
- Refunds appear on the refund processing date by default. Your refund profile can move them back to the original order date and controls when refunded product cost is reversed.
- Marketing, operating expenses, Amazon fees, and accounting values use the dates provided by their source, so they do not always line up with an individual order date.
- Product cost, shipping, handling, transaction fees, tax, marketing accounts, and custom costs follow the settings in the shop calculation profile.
- Currency values are converted to the selected display currency. In a consolidated report, each store is calculated with its own settings and currency first. Amounts are then combined, and percentages such as margin and ROAS are recalculated from the combined totals rather than averaged.
- Timeframe changes how results are grouped, not which qualifying data is included. Each column represents a day, week, month, quarter, or year; the summary represents the full selected period.
Check how a value was calculated
- Confirm the store, date range, timezone, currency, and prefilters. The current page exposes date controls but no product, customer, order, or country filters.
- Expand the relevant parent row—for example, COGS, Marketing, or Operating expenses—to see the amounts used. Use the formulas in Metrics and calculations to recompute the total without counting an expanded child twice.
- For sales or order differences, open Sales Breakdown, Products, or Orders to inspect the underlying activity. These reports have different purposes and may not total identically; see Resolve differences.
- For a cost difference, check the applicable product, shipping, refund, transaction-fee, ad-account, or QuickBooks setting in your shop calculation profile, then compare it with the connected source.
- If recent data is missing, check the source's latest import. Some large-store date ranges use precomputed daily results, so a refresh can reveal newer source changes.
Metrics and calculations
| Field | Documented calculation |
|---|---|
| Total sales | Product revenue + shipping revenue − discount codes − refunds. This tax-inclusive parent already reflects its discount and refund children; do not subtract them again. |
| Product revenue | Product sales before coupon-code discounts and refunds; includes return fees. |
| Net sales | Total sales after taxes are deducted. Because Total sales already reflects discount codes and refunds, Net sales reflects those deductions too. This differs from Sales Breakdown. |
| COGS | Product costs + shipping costs + transaction fees + fulfillment expenses + other COGS. Transaction fees are hidden for Amazon stores. |
| Contribution margin | Net sales − COGS − marketing spend. Equivalently, this is Total sales − taxes − COGS − marketing spend; discount codes and refunds are not subtracted a second time. |
| Net profit | Contribution margin − operating expenses. |
| Gross margin % | (net sales − COGS) / net sales × 100. |
| Net margin % | net profit / net sales × 100. |
| Refunds %, COGS %, Marketing % | The named amount divided by net sales × 100. |
| Blended CAC | Total marketing spend / new customers. |
| Blended ROAS | Net sales / total marketing spend. |
| New customer ROAS | New-customer net sales / total marketing spend. |
| Profit per new customer | (new-customer net sales − new-customer COGS − total marketing spend) / new customers. |
| Repeat customers | Unique existing customers with a repeat order in the bucket; multiple orders count the customer once. |
| Repeat orders % | Repeat orders / all orders × 100. |
| Repeat sales % | Repeat-customer net sales / net sales × 100. |
| AOV | Sales after discount codes and before refunds / orders. New- and repeat-customer AOV use their respective sales and orders. |
| Average number of items | Total line-item quantity / orders. |
Amazon stores additionally expose Amazon fees and detailed referral, FBA fulfillment/storage/inbound/removal/disposal, reimbursement, deal, Vine, and miscellaneous fee categories. Some fees aggregate marketplaces sharing the displayed currency.
Example workflow
- Select a period and a comparable period with the same number and type of days, then choose the grain that exposes the change.
- Start with Net profit and Contribution margin. Expand the largest changed parent row rather than summing headline rows that already include their children.
- If sales changed, reconcile it in Sales Breakdown. If COGS changed, continue to Products and then Orders. Check connected marketing or accounting sources for expense changes.
- Confirm both periods use the intended prefilters, refund profile, currency, and cost fallbacks before exporting.
For a simplified period with $100 net sales, $40 COGS, $15 marketing, and $10 operating expenses, gross margin is (100 − 40) / 100 = 60%, contribution margin is $45, and net profit is $35. This example assumes discounts, refunds, and taxes are already reflected in net sales; do not subtract expanded components twice.
Resolve differences
- Sales Breakdown uses sales-ledger semantics and does not apply Income Statement prefilters or cost settings; its totals can legitimately differ even with matching dates.
- Product-level gross profit excludes costs that cannot be allocated to a product, so Products need not sum to company gross margin.
- Missing cost or ad integrations overstate profitability. QuickBooks mapping determines which source supplies a category.
- Consolidated views convert each shop to the common display currency, sum additive values, and recalculate ratios from combined totals.
Next actions
Use Sales Breakdown to reconcile sales, Products and Orders to locate detail, or Forecasting to project future sales and marketing requirements.