Accuracy & Limitations

Ordara's inventory figures are a management view — good enough to tell you what you hold, what you have made, and which products are worth reordering. They are not a bookkeeping system of record.

This page lists every place the numbers are approximate and what that means in practice. Worth reading once before you rely on these figures for anything that matters.

Not tax or accounting advice

Ordara is not an accounting product, and nothing it produces is tax advice. Do not file from these figures. Reconcile against your marketplace payout reports and bank statements, and talk to an accountant about your own situation.

Where cost figures come from

Your cost basis is the per-item price parsed out of the order confirmation email. Three consequences:

• Shipping and taxes are not included. What you paid to have an order delivered to you, and the sales tax on it, are not allocated into unit cost. Your true landed cost is higher than the cost per unit Ordara shows.
• Order-level discounts are not allocated. A promo code or gift card applied to the order as a whole does not reduce the per-item price.
• Some emails have no per-item price at all. Ordara treats those lines as price unknown, not free. Their units still count as inventory — Ordered, Delivered, On hand — but stay out of the cost average, so a missing price cannot drag the figure down. It holds the product's costing open instead; see Lines with no price.

The fix for all three is the same: edit the cost on the Orders tab. Overridden lines are flagged, and your parsed order data is untouched.

An override of $0.00 is not the same as a missing price

Setting a line to zero yourself is a statement — this really was free — and counts as a complete basis, labelling the product Known free rather than flagging it. A price that never arrived stays unknown. Set the cost even when the answer is zero.

Costs are frozen, but they are not historical costs

Recording a sale or write-off freezes the product's weighted-average cost onto it. Restocking later moves the average for future transactions only, so profit for a period you have already reviewed does not drift under you.

What is frozen is the average as it stood at the time — not the price you paid for those particular units. Ordara does not do lot tracking. Buy at $20, buy again at $25, then sell, and the sale is costed at the blend, permanently.

When the freeze does not happen

Freezing needs a complete basis. All three must hold:

• at least one purchase carries a price Ordara can use,
• none of the product's lines came through without a price, and
• none are waiting in Needs review.

Miss any and the transaction is left provisional, valued at the product's current average — which keeps moving. Ordara freezes it retroactively once the product qualifies: a new order, a cost you override, a review you clear, a merge or a split. Only blanks are filled; a frozen cost is never rewritten.

Drift is therefore confined to provisional transactions, and the markers below are what tell you they exist. A figure carrying none of them is settled.

Exporting a permanent record

Once a period's transactions are frozen, its Profit & Loss CSV will not move on you. If the statement carries an amber warning, some of it is still provisional — export before your next restock if you want that snapshot preserved.

Cancellations remove units, not always whole orders

Cancellation is counted per unit. A whole-order cancellation drops every one of that order's lines out of the metrics; a line-level cancellation removes only the units the retailer cancelled and leaves the rest counted.

Retailers are inconsistent about this — several send the same "an item has been cancelled" wording whether one line or the whole order went. Ordara treats a cancellation as partial only when it can name the cancelled products and units are left over, and escalates to a full cancellation once every unit on the order has been covered. When it cannot tell, it takes the cautious reading and cancels the order.

Either way the units leave the weighted average, so the product's cost per unit can move afterwards. Transactions already frozen keep the cost they were frozen at; provisional ones are revalued.

In the extreme case — every order behind a product cancelled, but sales already recorded against it and never frozen — no cost basis is left at all. See Products with no cost basis below.

Products with no cost basis

Nothing behind the product carries a price Ordara can use: every order behind it was cancelled, or it has dropped off the inventory list and only a write-off still points at it.

Not the same as a missing price

An email that never carried a per-item price does not land here — that has its own marker and behaviour, under Lines with no price. This section is about having no priced purchase left at all.

Its cost per unit is $0.00, so any units still valued at that cost contribute $0.00 to cost of goods sold, and that much of its "profit" is really just revenue minus fees. Left unlabelled that reads as a 100% margin — a spectacular flip rather than an absence of data.

Ordara marks it, but the surfaces do not all mean the same thing.

These describe the cost per unit, and appear whenever it is missing:

Where	What you see
Product list	No cost basis in place of the Cost/Unit figure
Product page	The same on the cost/unit card and the weighted-average row
Inventory CSV	No recorded cost in the Cost Basis column

These describe the totals, and appear only when unvalued units are still priced from that missing cost:

Where	What you see
Product list	An asterisk beside Profit, and the gain shown in grey rather than green
Product page	A footnote under Net profit, and "cost not recorded" under the Profit card
Portfolio Profit / Loss card	"some units have no cost" in place of the revenue/fees footer
Profit & Loss report	A Some units are valued at $0 banner naming the affected products
Profit & Loss CSV	The same warning as a Warning row at the end of the file
Inventory CSV	A Warning row at the end explaining the column mark

The split matters in one case: a product whose orders were all cancelled after its transactions were recorded. Those were frozen at a real cost, so the second group stays quiet while the first still labels it. A product can show No cost basis and a completely trustworthy margin at the same time.

It has to be every transaction, not just every sale — an unvalued write-off moves shrinkage rather than COGS, leaving the product list quiet while still tripping the portfolio card and the P&L.

The figures themselves are left alone. Dropping these products from your totals would quietly remove revenue you really did take, which is a worse lie than an overstated margin.

A gain loses its colour, a loss keeps it

While units wait to be valued, a positive figure is not really profit, so it shows in plain grey rather than green. A negative figure stays red — a loss is real either way, and the true loss is worse than shown, since the missing cost has not been charged against it.

A product whose sales were all valued keeps its green, missing cost basis or not.

To fix a product, set the real cost on its Orders tab. That settles anything still waiting to be valued and prices whatever you record next.

If the orders were genuinely cancelled and the units really sold, there is no cost to recover. What that leaves depends on how much was already valued: all-frozen sales still give you a margin you can trust, with only the cost per unit gone; units never valued leave a margin that is genuinely unknown, and Ordara keeps saying so on the totals.

One caveat on the P&L banner

The banner names the products it can. A product that has dropped off the inventory list entirely — no live orders, no sales, adjustments netting to zero — can still contribute a write-off to the period. It will trip the warning without being named, so the list can be shorter than the number of products actually affected.

Lines with no price hold the cost open

When a retailer's email carries no per-item price, Ordara records the line as price unknown. It does not guess, and it does not treat the blank as zero:

• The units are real inventory. They count in Ordered, Delivered, On hand and Unsold exactly like any other line.
• They are outside the cost average. Cost/Unit is the average over the units whose price Ordara actually knows, so an unknown line neither dilutes it nor makes it look cheaper than it is.
• They stop new costs freezing. While any contributing line is unpriced the basis is incomplete, so sales and write-offs stay provisional rather than freezing at a figure built from partial information.

That last point is the useful one: a missing price no longer bakes an understated cost into your history. It holds the valuation open and says so.

Where you will see it: Missing purchase price in the inventory CSV's Cost Basis column, and the incomplete-cost warnings on the product, portfolio and Profit & Loss surfaces while affected units remain unvalued.

Set the cost on the product's Orders tab. Once no line is unpriced the basis is complete, provisional transactions freeze against it, and the marker clears. If the item really was free, enter $0.00 explicitly — that counts as an answer, a blank does not.

Lines awaiting review sit outside the cost basis

A purchase waiting in Needs review is not in its likely product's weighted average — but that product's unvalued units are priced from that average anyway. The cost is real; it just does not cover every purchase behind the units it is valuing. Nothing about the figure looks wrong, which is why Ordara marks it.

It splits the same way as a missing cost basis. About the cost figure, shown whenever a line is pending:

Where	What you see
Product list	An asterisk beside Cost/Unit, explained on hover
Product page	"excludes N pending" under the Cost/Unit card, and an asterisk on the weighted-average row
Inventory CSV	Excludes pending review in the Cost Basis column

About the totals, shown only while units are still being priced from that incomplete cost:

Where	What you see
Product list	An asterisk beside Profit
Product page	"cost incomplete" under the Profit card, and a note under the profit ledger
Portfolio Profit / Loss card	"cost excludes pending review" in place of the revenue/fees footer
Profit & Loss report	A Some units are valued at an incomplete cost banner naming the products
Profit & Loss CSV	The same warning as a Warning row
Inventory CSV	Its own Warning row

A product with an open queue but every transaction already valued shows the Cost/Unit marker alone. Clearing the queue cannot move a profit that is already settled — and may not move the cost either: rejecting a match gives the line its own product and leaves this average untouched, while confirming one shifts the figure only if the incoming price differs from the average it joins.

This one goes both ways

Unlike a missing cost basis, an incomplete one is not biased in a single direction. An unreviewed line cheaper than the current average means your profit is understated. Do not assume the figure is flattering — assume it is unsettled.

Either answer settles it: both end the pending state and freeze whatever was waiting on it. Only Same product can move the average.

Same nameability caveat

Like the no-cost-basis banner, this one names the products it can. A product that has dropped off the inventory list can trip the flag without appearing in the list.

Quantities are only as good as the emails

• Delivered counts are heuristic. When a retailer's emails do not break delivery down by item, an order marked delivered counts all of its units as delivered. A partial delivery from such a retailer will read as complete, so your on-hand figure runs high until the rest arrives. The count is capped at the line's surviving quantity, so it can overstate when units arrived but never how many exist.
• Nothing is ever automatically marked sold. Ordara cannot see your marketplace listings. If you do not record a sale on the product's Sales tab, those units stay on hand forever.
• Archiving an order does not touch inventory. Archive only removes an order from the Orders list; it is still counted in every inventory figure exactly as before. Only a cancelled status removes an order's units from inventory. Hiding a product is a separate thing — see Managing Inventory.

Product grouping is fuzzy matching

Ordara groups order lines into products by comparing product names, which retailers write inconsistently. Names are normalized — case, punctuation and filler removed — then scored for similarity:

Similarity	What happens
90% or higher	Attached to the existing product automatically
70% – 90%	Held in Needs review for you to confirm
Below 70%	Becomes a new product

Two patterns override that score, because raw similarity handles them badly on long retailer titles:

• One name says everything the other does, plus more. Capped just below the automatic threshold, so such a pair never attaches on its own — one that would have scored above 90% goes to Needs review instead, and a low-scoring one is unaffected. The extra word is usually what separates two SKUs — Case, Bundle, GS, Sealed, Pro — but on a twelve-word title one extra word still scores over 90%. A Booster Bundle and its Case scored 91% before this cap, at $28 and $130 respectively.
• Each name carries a number the other does not. Capped below the review threshold, so the two become separate products with no queue entry: Size 8 against Size 10, Vol 5 against Vol 6, 256gb against 512gb. Sending a size run to review would be costly as well as wrong — pending lines sit outside the cost basis, so importing twelve sizes would leave eleven outside your P&L until you cleared a queue of rejections.

A third rule covers ties: when a name matches two or more products equally well, Ordara sends the item to Needs review and offers every tied product rather than picking one.

Mistakes in both directions are still expected — two products merged, or one split across several entries. Correct them with Merge / Split and the Needs review queue; see Managing Inventory.

Not modeled

Ordara's inventory deliberately does not implement:

• FIFO or lot costing — tracking which specific purchase each sold unit came from. Ordara only does weighted average.
• Returns and refunds — delete the sale instead, which removes its revenue and fees entirely. For a partial return, delete the sale and record it again for the quantity that stuck.
• Sales tax collected or remitted on your sales
• Multiple storage locations
• Automatic sale detection from marketplaces

Negative on-hand is allowed

Selling more units than you have delivered is permitted — it is what pre-selling looks like. The on-hand figure goes negative and turns red as a signal, not an error. It resolves itself when the units arrive.

Your data stays on this machine

Inventory lives in the desktop app's local database. It is not synced to the web dashboard, and there is no multi-user or accountant access.

Reconciling a figure you disagree with

Start on the product page. The Orders tab shows every line that feeds Ordered and Cost/Unit, the Sales and Adjustments tabs show every entry you have recorded, and the right-hand ledgers show the arithmetic. How the Math Works walks through the same figures in detail.