Before the build, "net sales" meant three different things depending on who built the tab. The founder had one number, the CFO had another, and the master workbook had a third, and every month one full day of the close went to arguing about which was right.
Week one of the build included a two-hour definitions workshop: founder and CFO in the same room, every contested metric argued once, on the record. The output was 14 plain-English definitions, written down and signed by both. Then each one was encoded as a SQL view in the warehouse. Every dashboard tile and every close-pack page reads from those views and nowhere else.
The argument cannot recur, because the number can no longer be rebuilt by hand. Anyone who disputes a figure is disputing a definition they signed, and the change process is a signature, not a spreadsheet.
The lesson of this engagement: the close was never slow because people were slow. It was slow because six sources spoke different languages and nobody had signed a dictionary.
| # | Definition | As signed, in plain English | Encoded as |
|---|
| 01 |
Net sales |
Gross order value minus discounts, refunds, and marketplace fees, recognized on ship date, computed the same way for all three channels. |
metric_net_sales |
| 02 |
Landed cost |
Supplier unit cost plus inbound freight, duties, and prep, averaged per SKU per receiving batch. |
metric_landed_cost |
| 03 |
True freight per order |
Actual carrier invoice cost allocated to each shipped order, not the rate-card estimate and never a monthly guess. |
metric_freight_per_order |
| 04 |
Return rate |
Units received back at the 3PL divided by units shipped in the same period, counted on warehouse receipt, not on customer claim. |
metric_return_rate |
| 05 |
Channel margin |
Net sales minus landed cost, fulfillment cost, and channel fees, per channel per month, so DTC, Amazon, and wholesale are finally comparable. |
metric_channel_margin |
| 06 |
Sellable inventory |
On-hand units at the 3PL minus damaged, reserved, and quarantined units, counted from the WMS, not the storefront. |
metric_sellable_inventory |
| 07 |
Weeks of cover |
Sellable inventory divided by the trailing eight-week average of weekly units shipped, per SKU. |
metric_weeks_of_cover |
| 08 |
Fulfillment cost per order |
3PL pick, pack, and materials fees plus true freight, divided by orders shipped in the period. |
metric_fulfillment_cost |
Eight of the fourteen signed definitions, shown as they read in the signed document. The remaining six cover the same ground for wholesale terms, refunds, exchanges, ad-spend attribution windows, payout timing, and SKU-level contribution.