Orders & Inventory's dashboard gives you several ready-made figures: two recent-activity tiles, a shipping tile, and two charts. Each one answers a useful question, but the date range, currency, or grouping is not always exactly what the label suggests. Use this article to understand what each figure counts before you rely on it.
Prerequisites
- This article covers Orders & Inventory's own dashboard (Orders & Inventory › Overview). Some accounts use a different custom dashboard instead. If yours does, these tile-by-tile details do not apply.
Orders (Last 30 Days) and Sales (Last 30 Days)
The Orders (last 30 days) tile counts every order dated after the day that was thirty days ago. The thirtieth day itself is excluded from this tile, even though Rhythm treats it as part of the window elsewhere. Every order status counts, including orders that were later voided or cancelled, so this is not a count of active or completed orders. The tile also includes orders from every part of your account, including memberships, events, merchandise, and more. Because of that, the total can be higher than you expect if you were thinking only about online store sales.
Warning
An order's created date can appear one calendar day later on screen than the actual transaction date. This affects only the date shown in the interface; the rest of the order's transaction data is not affected.
The Sales (last 30 days) tile uses that same set of orders and adds their totals in your account's base currency. The total is not rounded to whole cents. Voided and cancelled orders are included here too, so the sales figure can include money from orders that did not ultimately go through. Only the sales tile shows a comparison with the previous period, and that rise-or-fall comparison appears only when the previous period has a non-zero figure.
Tip
When you click either tile to view the orders behind it, the list can include one extra day at the edge of the window compared with the tile count. Clicking the sales figure opens a regular order list, not a totaled view, so the tile itself is the only place that sales total appears.
Order Pending Shipping
This tile counts every order with the exact status "awaiting shipping," no matter when the order was placed. The number can be up to a day old because it is not always recalculated when you open the dashboard. If you shipped an order very recently, it can still appear in this count until the figure refreshes. The recalculate control on this tile also does not force a fresh count the way it does on the orders and sales tiles.
Sales by Product Type, Month by Month
The chart labeled by product category actually groups sales by each product's type, such as Membership, Events, or Merchandise. It does not use the merchandise categories you set up in your catalog, so it will not show category-level detail.
The chart title describes a shorter window than the chart actually uses. The chart is built from twelve months of data, not six. Within that window, it uses only the first part of each order date to group sales by month. That puts January through September of a year into one point on the line, and October through December into a second point. Instead of showing roughly twelve points per product type, the chart usually shows about three. If a line looks unexpectedly flat or sparse, this grouping is very likely the reason, rather than a lack of sales.
Top Sellers
The top-sellers chart ranks product types by sales total over the trailing twelve months, not individual products. If your account only sells merchandise, you see one slice instead of one slice per item. When there are more than a handful of product types, the chart names only the top few and combines the rest into one "Everything else" slice. A smaller product type's sales are included in that combined slice rather than dropped.
One Product's Own Totals
A merchandise item's own order count and sales total, shown on its record page, work a little differently from the dashboard tiles:
- The order count is a count of order lines, not units. One line for five units of the item counts once, not five times.
- The sales total adds that product's line totals in each order's own currency, without converting between currencies. If your account takes orders in more than one currency, this total can mix amounts from different currencies, even though it always shows one currency label.
Both figures include lines from orders that were later voided or cancelled, just as the dashboard tiles do.
Why These Figures Are Worth Checking Carefully
These figures do not update the instant something changes. Each one can be held for a while before it is recalculated. If a dashboard number does not match what you expected, the most common reasons are the ones above: an included status you did not expect, a period that is longer or shorter than the label says, or a grouping that is broader than it looks.
The same kind of mismatch can appear on individual records. A contact's Orders lozenge counts every order the contact is associated with, including an order where someone else is billed. That contact's Orders tab counts only orders billed to them. The Transactions tab counts every transaction connected to the contact, including invoices and payments, so a single order can appear as more than one transaction there. If those three counts on a contact do not match each other, that is expected rather than a sign of a data problem.
For a precise answer that avoids these built-in figures, build a report instead. See Orders & Inventory's Report Starting Points for the available query types.