Introduction

Before diving into the numbers, it helps to understand the profit concepts ProTally is built around.

Gross profit

Gross profit measures what you earn after the direct costs of delivering your product or service. It's a core indicator of profitability and feeds into decisions about:

  • Pricing strategy — whether your prices comfortably cover the cost of each sale.
  • Cost management — where costs are eating into your returns.
  • Business performance — the underlying health of each product, and the business overall.

In ProTally, gross profit for a sale is its revenue minus the cost of goods you've configured for that price.

Net profit

ProTally goes a step further and reports net profit — gross profit after Stripe's processing fees are also removed. Because Stripe's fees are a real, unavoidable cost of taking a payment, including them gives you a truer picture of what each sale actually leaves in your pocket.

In short:

  • Revenue — what your customer paid.
  • − Stripe fees — what Stripe charged you to process the payment.
  • − Cost of goods — what it cost you to fulfil the sale.
  • = Net profit — what you actually keep.

Together, Stripe fees and cost of goods make up the Expenses figure you see in the Account Overview.

Margin

Margin expresses profit as a percentage of revenue, which makes products of very different sizes easy to compare. A £5 product and a £5,000 product can have the same 40% margin. ProTally uses margin to rank product health and to summarise performance across your catalogue.

Real-time by design

ProTally calculates profit as your Stripe payments complete — there's nothing to run or export. New sales flow into your overviews automatically, and a one-time data sync brings in your history so trends are complete from day one.

Where to go next