CogsIQ

A TikTok Shop seller can read revenue off the dashboard in seconds. What they kept is far harder. The costs that decide profitability arrive from six different places, in six different formats, on six different schedules — freight forwarders, customs brokers, the platform's own fee statements, affiliate commission, ad spend, and 3PL handling invoices.

None of them reconcile to an order. Freight bills a shipment; the platform bills a transaction; the 3PL bills a month. By the time anything lands in a spreadsheet, the per-unit truth has been averaged away — and a best-seller and a loss-maker look identical.

Allocation, not arithmetic. A single freight invoice covers many purchase orders, and splitting it by order value is the intuitive choice that quietly produces wrong answers — a pallet of cheap heavy goods absorbs almost none of the cost it actually caused. We allocate by weight, value or count depending on the cost type, which is the difference between a number that looks plausible and one a seller can act on.

Then there is time. Inventory bought at one landed cost sells months later at another. Averaging hides margin erosion exactly when it matters, so costing is FIFO by batch: each shipment carries its own real cost through to the units that came from it.

An ingestion and reconciliation layer that accepts the messy source documents as they actually arrive, then a costing engine that turns them into per-unit, per-SKU and per-batch margin. Accrual and cash views sit on top, including payouts still held in platform reserve, because the question "what did I make" and "what can I spend" have different answers.

Agencies managing several shops get scoped multi-tenant access and management-fee reconciliation, so the operator running ten stores sees each one cleanly and their own margin on top.

Running our own product in production changes the advice we give. We have carried the cost of our own schema decisions, our own reconciliation edge cases, and our own on-call. That tends to make us more conservative about the things that are expensive to change later, and more willing to move fast on the things that aren't.