What counts as revenue in the profit report?

The short answer

Revenue in this report is the net line total of the goods sold, after discounts, excluding tax and excluding shipping. Refunds count as negative amounts in the period they were issued.

Tax is not yours, so it is out. Shipping is a cost you both charge and pay, so counting it as revenue while its cost sits outside the cost of goods would make the margin look better than it is.

What WooCommerce actually does

An order is a set of lines. Product lines carry a net total and a tax total separately; shipping is its own line; coupons have already been applied to the product line totals by the time the order is stored. The cost of goods sits on the product lines only — shipping lines have no cost field at all.

That is why a profit report built on the core cost field is naturally a goods report: the core records what the goods cost and nothing about what the courier cost.

What to do about it

Expect your revenue figure to sit slightly below the one in WooCommerce Analytics, and know the three reasons:

• shipping — included in Analytics totals, excluded here;
• tax — excluded from both, but easy to mix up when comparing against a bank statement;
• statuses — the two reports count a slightly different set of orders.

Analytics has no cost figure to compare at all: it does not read the cost field — why the cost is not in Analytics.

If you want the full picture of what a sale leaves you, keep track of shipping and payment fees separately for now. This report answers the narrower question honestly rather than the wider one approximately.

How Merchgain reports it

The definition above is printed under every table, in exactly those words. The summary card for revenue repeats the short version — net of discounts, excluding tax and shipping — so the number cannot be read out of context.

Gross profit is revenue minus the cost of goods recorded on those same lines, counted only where the cost is known.