Make your numbers make sense.

Why your Shopify sales will never match your QuickBooks revenue

Your Shopify dashboard says one number, your P&L says another, and they never tie. That's not a bug — it's accounting. Here's the bridge from channel sales down to book revenue, line by line, and how to tell a normal gap from one that's actually a problem.

Wauvel now reads your Shopify sales — meet your Sales Analyst

Connect your Shopify store in a few clicks and a new Sales section lands on your Command Center — net sales, orders, average order value, and a weekly trend. Read-only, and the first of a family: the Sales Analyst is source-agnostic, so Stripe, Faire, and more plug into the same view over time.

Sales tax isn't revenue: the number that fools every online seller

Your store's "total sales" number includes the sales tax you collected — and that money was never yours. It's a liability you're holding for the state until you remit it, not revenue. Book it as revenue and you inflate your top line, distort your margins, and start spending cash you already owe.

Planning cash for Q4: the inventory buy that breaks holiday brands

For a product brand, Q4 is where you make your year — and the cash math runs backwards. You pay for the holiday inventory in August, the revenue lands in December, and the cash from those sales lands later still. A profitable holiday can still punch a hole in your bank account in the middle. Here's how to find the trough before it finds you.

You already did the work and booked the sale — the money is just sitting in someone else's account. DSO measures how long. Here's how a CFO reads days sales outstanding, turns each day into dollars, and works down the number with a collections playbook that doesn't cost you a customer.

Every business has a monthly sales number below which it's quietly losing money — and most owners have never actually calculated it. Here's break-even the way a CFO runs it: split your costs into two piles, find the contribution each sale makes, and read the line you have to clear — plus your margin of safety, the volume to hit a profit target, and why a small discount costs so much.

You marked up the parts and billed the hours — so why is the bank account tight? Part five of the series takes apart one job the way a trades business actually runs: the unit is one job, the ladder runs gross → contribution → net, the killer is the field hour that never reaches an invoice, and a busy, profitable crew can still run out of cash waiting on the draw.

A restaurant is every other business at once — physical COGS like a product, perishable capacity like a services firm, and thin margins riding on a heavy fixed nut. Part four of the series: the unit is one cover, the ladder runs gross → contribution → net, prime cost is the number you live by, and break-even sits so close to a full house that turns decide everything.

You bill $150 an hour and pay your people far less — so where does the money go? Part three of the series: the unit is one billable hour, the ladder runs realized rate → gross margin → net margin, utilization is the churn-sized lever nobody watches, and the one cost a box and a subscription never have to eat — the hour you couldn't sell.