Profit Report

[willough]

We are long time Miva users and I am completely baffled trying to create a simple profit report by product for a given date range. This seems to be a pretty basic business requirement yet I cannot see how to locate it nor create one without customization requiring a developer. On competing systems such reports show "You can use profit reports to see information about your costs, margins, and profit". So, I am wondering what I am missing and, if not available, why does cost get entered for each product and/or attribute? There are sales by product reports, actually 2 separate ones - one for units and another for revenue, itself a mysterious separation - but neither report reflects cost. And if this is to be a batch report is there some code repository where I can fetch it? How can we produce this seemingly fundamental report? Thanks for any insight.

[Kent Multer]

I think the product Cost field was originally added to the store so that it could be used for computing discounts, such as "5% over cost" instead of "20% off retail." Apparently most Miva users haven't felt the need for the type of report you're looking for. Many of them don't use the Cost field, or they re-purpose it for other things instead of using a custom field.

I've written a lot of reporting modules; I can probably create one for you at a good price. If you're interested in that, you can PM or email me to discuss the details.

Thanks & Have a good weekend! --

[William Davis]

I think the product Cost field was originally added to the store so that it could be used for computing discounts, such as "5% over cost" instead of "20% off retail." Apparently most Miva users haven't felt the need for the type of report you're looking for. Many of them don't use the Cost field, or they re-purpose it for other things instead of using a custom field.

I've written a lot of reporting modules; I can probably create one for you at a good price. If you're interested in that, you can PM or email me to discuss the details.

Thanks & Have a good weekend! --

You should list all the report modules you have in stock, store owners like me might be interested in it.

[willough]

I think in this day the concept of using the cost field as a workaround for computing discounts seems antiquated, though I realize the main product page had been used for that in prior generations. You would think by now that function had migrated to its own area like in marketing, and cost would be used for -- cost. Cost is also a field for each attribute when options are required. It seems a large omission on any modern, sophisticated ecommerce platform, as Miva is in most other respects, to not have basic profit and loss reporting built in. While I appreciate Kent's offer and may reach out to him, the need to hire a developer to ferret out the information from the database, or use of a third party software and their system, seems a difficult way to obtain this data. I am a bit surprised this is not a bigger issue for other users. What are others doing to determine profit by product and period? I am really curious to know.

[William Davis]

I think in this day the concept of using the cost field as a workaround for computing discounts seems antiquated, though I realize the main product page had been used for that in prior generations. You would think by now that function had migrated to its own area like in marketing, and cost would be used for -- cost. Cost is also a field for each attribute when options are required. It seems a large omission on any modern, sophisticated ecommerce platform, as Miva is in most other respects, to not have basic profit and loss reporting built in. While I appreciate Kent's offer and may reach out to him, the need to hire a developer to ferret out the information from the database, or use of a third party software and their system, seems a difficult way to obtain this data. I am a bit surprised this is not a bigger issue for other users. What are others doing to determine profit by product and period? I am really curious to know.

We use MS Excel.

[oliverands]

As robust of a sales platform as Miva is, it's not (and will never will be) a management reporting solution. If you really want to do custom reporting, you will eventually need to develop something outside Miva.

In my case, I use two different tools. I export order data from Miva and import it into a reporting database I have developed. For financial reporting, I use Quickbooks which has a very robust set of financial reports which more than meets my needs. And for operational reporting, I use a Microsoft PowerBI dashboard. With these two tools sitting on top of my order data from Miva, I have access to all the information I need to make intelligent decisions. And when I have questions for the data, I can develop my own custom reports to find the answers.

Granted, reporting in Miva is rudimentary to say the least. But the reports any one business will want will differ from what any other business will want. For example, your desire for a profitability by product report for a specific date range is not something I would find useful (but if I want to see that, Quickbooks has it), and an essential report for me on my actual shipping costs vs. shipping and handling prices charged may not be important to you. So no matter how many reports Miva would develop, it would still not meet the needs of all their users.

I would encourage you to think about how you can leverage the sales data that Miva has to develop your own custom reports that meet your own specific needs. You don't need to develop big complex custom solutions. You can start, as Bill suggests, but developing some Excel templates that you update every so often. But you will really need to do this outside Miva instead of waiting for the specific reports that you want to be available in the software.

[William Davis]

As robust of a sales platform as Miva is, it's not (and will never will be) a management reporting solution. If you really want to do custom reporting, you will eventually need to develop something outside Miva.

In my case, I use two different tools. I export order data from Miva and import it into a reporting database I have developed. For financial reporting, I use Quickbooks which has a very robust set of financial reports which more than meets my needs. And for operational reporting, I use a Microsoft PowerBI dashboard. With these two tools sitting on top of my order data from Miva, I have access to all the information I need to make intelligent decisions. And when I have questions for the data, I can develop my own custom reports to find the answers.

Granted, reporting in Miva is rudimentary to say the least. But the reports any one business will want will differ from what any other business will want. For example, your desire for a profitability by product report for a specific date range is not something I would find useful (but if I want to see that, Quickbooks has it), and an essential report for me on my actual shipping costs vs. shipping and handling prices charged may not be important to you. So no matter how many reports Miva would develop, it would still not meet the needs of all their users.

I would encourage you to think about how you can leverage the sales data that Miva has to develop your own custom reports that meet your own specific needs. You don't need to develop big complex custom solutions. You can start, as Bill suggests, but developing some Excel templates that you update every so often. But you will really need to do this outside Miva instead of waiting for the specific reports that you want to be available in the software.

oliverands, all true. The problem is most small and many medium size businesses lack the necessary resources to implement, use and maintain the all tools you mentioned. Heck, just keeping up with the use of business application UI updates alone can overwhelm any small business not to mention costs.

[Rick Wilson]

We're currently looking at a partnership with a product that would provide a robust look into this data (assuming you have good data in QuickBooks or Miva), but for now it's still exploratory.

[willough]

Thanks Rick. While admittedly there is varying need regarding reports, profit and margin are common to all businesses and anything that can provide that, whether built in or integrated, would be useful. I think users develop workarounds or use third party systems to get the data and it would beneficial to get it as easily as possible. We use a couple of third party apps now for shipping and order management but they each lack the ability to gather this information.

[Kent Multer]

You should list all the report modules you have in stock, store owners like me might be interested in it.

Most of them are sort of quirky, tailored to the specific needs of the client.

• I wrote several modules that report on sales, divided up by the specific customers, or by specific products (e.g. "List all customers who purchased product XXXX").
• I wrote a module that can do queries of the form: List all customers who have made [at least / exactly / at most] [some number "N"] orders in the last [some number "T"] [days / years].
• For clients who want to study their subscription sales, I've written a module that shows you the average and total for length of subscription, sales per order, total sales over the life of the subscription, total sales during a specific time span, etc.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Thanks Rick. While admittedly there is varying need regarding reports, profit and margin are common to all businesses and anything that can provide that, whether built in or integrated, would be useful. I think users develop workarounds or use third party systems to get the data and it would beneficial to get it as easily as possible. We use a couple of third party apps now for shipping and order management but they each lack the ability to gather this information.

One of the issues overlooked is that True "profit / loss" reports are more than the an equation between fields in miva's data base. For example, employee salaries and costs, warehousing, shipping supplies, etc. Because of that, not even sure why miva included any such type of revenure sales. I (being king of the world) would have just focused on making it easier to get data out of miva and into actual sales reporting/business management tools (i.e., easy to configure, dymanic push types of export).

BTW: I'm one of those grumpy 'get off my lawn' types who really is tired of every tool trying to be every tool instead of building tools that actually work with great finesse. :)

[willough]

Even though I am using the term profit report I would not have any expectation that Miva would deal with all the other expenses of a business. I am really just referring to a few basics to determine gross profit: revenue and cost by product (and variant) by period. Alternately, what third party can Miva currently export cost information to if that lifting is to be done in another system? As I said at the outset, there are cost fields for each product and attribute. If data is used in these fields, where does is it go and what is it is used for?

I know Kent said the cost field had been used for showing discounts but a custom field could replace that today.

[Rick Wilson]

It's worth noting this could be done fairly easily today with Custom Fields and a batch report, but it's also something we're exploring via a future partnership.