You can ship more and still lose money (we expanded margin reporting in Vectis 1.5.0)

Picture this: It is Thursday. Your dashboard says orders are up 18% week over week. The warehouse cleared its backlog. Carriers picked up on time. You should feel great.

Then someone from finance drops a one-line question in Slack: Cool volume. What did we actually keep after COGS and shipping?

If your stomach did a small flip, you are not dramatic. You are honest. Velocity without margin is a scoreboard that lies politely.

The problem most dashboards skip

Fulfillment software is built to move boxes. That is the job. So the first metrics you see are usually movement: orders received, orders shipped, exceptions, maybe AOV if you are lucky.

Those metrics matter for running the floor. They do not automatically tell you whether you are building a business or just shipping boxes for practice.

Margin is where the story gets real. A channel can look “hot” on revenue and still be a leak once you fold in:

Product cost and landed assumptions
Discounts and promos you forgot were still running
Shipping choices that felt fine at checkout and expensive at invoice
Returns that show up late in the accounting month, not in your “today” ops view

We are not saying velocity is useless. We are saying: if you only optimize for speed, you can absolutely win the wrong game.

What we shipped in Vectis 1.5.0

In 1.5.0, we expanded profitability analytics so operators can see margin next to movement, not three meetings later in a spreadsheet.

The point is not a prettier chart. The point is being able to answer a hard question without exporting five CSVs and praying the joins are right:

Which SKUs or channels look good on revenue and bad on contribution?
Where are costs drifting without anyone noticing until month-end?
When fulfillment choices (carriers, splits, expedites) show up as margin, not just as “we got it out the door”

Exact navigation labels vary by tenant, but this lives under Reports → Analytics with a profitability view. If you want the longer field-level version of what analytics covers in Vectis, start at Reporting & Analytics.

Why this is actually hard (and we will not pretend otherwise)

Margin reporting is not a checkbox feature. It is a data honesty problem.

If your cost data is garbage, your margin view is garbage with extra confidence. We can surface fields and rollups, but we cannot invent discipline in your cost files. If nobody maintains unit costs, or promos live in a Google Sheet that only one person understands, software will not fix that by magic. It will just show you the gap faster.

Different businesses mean different “margin.” Some teams care about contribution after product cost. Some need landed cost. Some need freight allocated by weight or cube. If you expect one number to settle every argument in the building, you will still end up in a meeting with a spreadsheet. The goal here is narrower: give operators a sane place to see money next to motion in the same week they are running the building.

What we think this is for (and not for)

This is for teams who are tired of discovering margin problems after the shift is over and the labels are already on the boxes.

This is not for people who want one dashboard to clean up years of sloppy cost data by sheer force of optimism. We are an OMS. We care about operational truth. Finance still owns the chart of accounts.

Practical takeaways

Pick one question that matters and answer it weekly. Example: “Which channel has the worst margin after promos and shipping?” If you cannot answer it in one screen, you are flying blind on purpose.
Treat cost fields like inventory: someone owns them. If unitCost is optional in your world, it will stay optional in your decisions.
Pair velocity with margin when you change something real. New carrier, new channel, new box strategy: you should see both throughput and contribution move. If only one moves, ask why before you celebrate.
Use the release notes when you integrate. If you are pulling cost fields through the API (unitCost, costCurrency, lineCost on line items where exposed), see Release notes and the API reference so you are not guessing schema behavior.

The rest of 1.5.0

If you want the full list (bulk import API, GDPR workflows, WMS tweaks, reliability hardening), we did not hide it: Release notes and the shorter release roundup.

We like talking about boxes more than is probably healthy. We like talking about margin slightly less, because it is where the quiet mistakes get expensive. That is also why it belongs in the product.