How to Track Business Expenses with an eCommerce Financial Dashboard
Rebecca Lazar

March 12, 2023

In today’s fast-paced world of eCommerce, efficiency is key to staying competitive. Take advantage of recent technological innovations to simplify things like managing eCommerce returns and tracking your finances.

Just as ReturnGO’s returns management system helps you manage and track your eCommerce returns more efficiently, financial platforms such as Floodlight can help you streamline your eCommerce finances.

Having a bird’s eye view of your business, in terms of both returns and finances, helps you stay ahead of the competition and grow your business.

What is an eCommerce Financial Dashboard?

An eCommerce financial dashboard is a software tool that provides a centralized view of your business’s financial data, enabling you to monitor and analyze key metrics such as revenue, expenses, and profit margins in real-time.

With a financial dashboard, you can quickly identify trends and potential issues before they become a problem. 

Financial dashboards for eCommerce combine financial services, analytics, and domestic and international payments into a comprehensive dashboard to make it easy for you to track and manage your store’s finances.

Using a financial dashboard is essential for store owners and managers who want to keep track of their eCommerce store’s financial performance and optimize their profits. 

Providing real-time transparency into your store’s finances, eCommerce financial dashboards enable you to identify cost-saving opportunities and areas for improvement.

Metrics to Track on a Financial Dashboard

A financial dashboard can be a useful tool to help you visualize your store’s finances and track key metrics. 

Financial dashboards help you track eCommerce metrics such as:

Revenue

Track how much revenue you make each month and where it comes from, and use this information to make strategic decisions about pricing, promotions, and products.

Knowing how much money is coming in and where it is going can help you make informed decisions as your business grows.

Expenses by Category

Track how much you spend on different categories such as marketing, shipping, inventory, and other business expenses, and follow trends of your overall spend per category.

Using a financial dashboard gives you a clear overview of your expenses by category so that you can track your spending and identify cost-saving opportunities.

Profit Margins

Monitor your profit margins to understand how much money you are making on each sale.

You can use this information to make informed decisions about pricing, promotions, and products.

Top Channels

Identify which channels bring you the most revenue, and which aren’t performing as well. 

Having a bird’s-eye view of your various channels helps you see what’s most profitable and take action to strengthen your weak points.

The Benefits of Using an eCommerce Financial Dashboard

For your eCommerce business to grow with confidence, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your finances. 

By tracking your eCommerce finances on a financial dashboard you can gain valuable insights into your business’s financial health and make informed decisions to drive growth.

1. Control Over Your Business

Keeping track of cash flow, categorizing your expenses, and understanding revenue trends can be overwhelming. A financial dashboard helps automate these processes and provides a clear view of the financial health of your business.

Floodlight’s financial platform enables you to track all of your revenue and expenses in one place, including multiple business accounts, Google Ads, bank accounts, PayPal, and more.

By managing multiple business accounts, eCommerce stores, and virtual cards all in one place, you can be better organized and more confident in your finances. 

2. Save Time and Money

A financial dashboard can help you save time and money by providing you with real-time visibility into your eCommerce finances. With all your financial data in one place, you can quickly and easily analyze your sales, expenses, and profit margins without having to manually compile reports or dig through spreadsheets. 

Using a financial dashboard can help you identify areas where you can cut costs and optimize your spending, which will help you maximize your profitability. 

By having a clear understanding of your financial situation, you can focus your time and resources on the areas that are most important for the growth of your eCommerce business. 

3. Make Data-Driven Decisions

Analytics and insights into your eCommerce store finances can help you make data-driven decisions about where to allocate your resources.

One of the key benefits of using a financial platform like Floodlight is that insights are presented in an intuitive, visual, and user-friendly way. You don’t have to be a financial expert to understand the data.

Data-based insights can help you identify areas where your store is performing well and areas that need improvement. You can use these insights to identify which products are most popular, which marketing channels are driving the most traffic, and where you can reduce costs to improve your bottom line.

4. Monitor Profit Margins

Tracking profit margins can help you identify which products or categories are generating the most revenue, enabling you to adjust your fulfillment and marketing strategies accordingly. 

Profit margins can be calculated by analyzing data like the cost of goods sold, revenue, and expenses. Knowing your profit margins can help you find ways to optimize them and drive growth for your eCommerce business.

5. Identify Bottlenecks and Take Action

Identify areas where you can reduce costs and better manage your finances.

For example, high return rates can negatively impact your revenue trends, since when a product is returned, the revenue from the initial sale is lost. If your store has a high number of returns, this can have a significant impact on the overall revenue. 

6. Optimize Your Finances

Optimize your eCommerce finances by tracking revenue trends and investing in growth-generating activities such as expanding your product offerings or entering new markets. 

Analyzing your revenue trends and taking action to improve them can help you achieve maximum profitability throughout your business, from marketing to pricing to returns and everything in between.

The Financial Impact of Returns

Product returns often result in hidden costs (which can be difficult to track) that can have a significant impact on your store’s profits.

Tracking your return data with ReturnGO can help you manage your return costs and improve your return rates.

To get a clear picture of your store’s costs, it is important to track all expenses related to running an eCommerce store. Floodlight provides a complete view of all your revenue and expenses, making it easier to manage your finances.

Taking into account the costs associated with returns, like return shipping, the labor of receiving and validating returned items, and warehousing for returned items, and looking at your overall expenses broken down by category, can help you better manage your workflows and resource allocation.

Optimize Your eCommerce Finances

With all the moving pieces of managing an eCommerce business, it can be hard to stay on top of your finances. That’s where a financial platform like Floodlight comes in. 

Floodlight’s financial platform gives you insights into key areas of your eCommerce business, helping you make more informed decisions, identify issues, and track your finances across all of your departments and channels.

Using Floodlight, you have access to an automated multichannel eCommerce financial dashboard that provides a comprehensive overview of products, customers, promotions, inventory, fulfillment, and more, all in one place.

Tracking your revenue trends and analyzing everything about your finances will help you make your eCommerce business more profitable.

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