Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) is how much it costs you to produce or purchase the products you sell. Setting COGS in Dashboardly unlocks your most important profit metrics: Gross Profit, Operating Profit, Net Profit, Margin, and ROI.
Without COGS, these metrics will show as $0 or will not appear at all. This is the single most important setup step after connecting your shop.
Note on Net Sales: The formulas below use Net Sales, defined as Product Sales - Discounts (shipping revenue is excluded, matching TikTok Seller Center's definition).
Once you set your product costs, Dashboardly can calculate:
| Metric | Formula | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| Gross Profit | Net Sales - COGS | How much you keep after product costs |
| Margin | (Gross Profit / Net Sales) x 100 | Percentage of revenue kept after product costs |
| Operating Profit | Gross Profit - all expenses | Your actual operational profitability |
| ROI | (Operating Profit / COGS) x 100 | Return on your inventory investment |
| Net Profit | Operating Profit + Subsidy - Ads | Your final bottom-line profit |
Without COGS, Dashboardly can still show you revenue, fees, and shipping costs, but it cannot tell you whether you are actually making money on each product. Gross Profit will equal Net Sales (no costs subtracted), Margin will show as 100% (misleading), and ROI will not display at all.
Navigate to Inventory in the left sidebar. You will see a table of all your products listed as expandable rows, with their SKUs (variants) nested underneath.
The fastest way to set costs is at the product level. When you set a cost on a product, all SKUs under that product inherit it automatically.