Your dashboard tour: sales, profit and what needs doing today

A walkthrough of the DashVue dashboard KPIs, sales chart and period pills, and what each figure actually means.

The dashboard is the first thing you see when you log in, and it is built to answer one question at a glance: how is my eBay business doing right now, and what needs my attention today? This article walks through the six headline figures, the sales chart underneath them, and the period pills that control what date range they all show.

The six headline KPIs

Across the top of the dashboard you’ll see six figures, in this order:

  1. Total Sales: the value of orders in the selected period, net of any refunds.
  2. Cost of Goods (COGS): what you paid for the stock behind those sales, pulled from the cost you’ve entered against each inventory item.
  3. Selling Fees: eBay fees charged on those orders (final value fees and similar charges), shown as a percentage of sales underneath.
  4. Shipping: postage and fulfilment costs for the period.
  5. Expenses: other business costs you’ve logged that aren’t tied to a specific order.
  6. Net Profit: Total Sales minus COGS, Selling Fees, Shipping and Expenses, with a net margin percentage shown underneath.

Each card shows a small trend line and, where there is a previous period to compare against, a change indicator so you can see whether a figure is moving up or down.

VAT-registered sellers see ex-VAT figures

If your account is set up as VAT-registered, the “Total Sales” card (and the sales bars in the chart) show your income excluding the VAT you owe to HMRC, and Net Profit is calculated after that VAT liability. This is deliberate: the VAT portion of a sale isn’t really your money, it’s HMRC’s, so it shouldn’t be counted as part of your sales or profit. If your account isn’t marked as VAT-registered, these figures include the full, gross sale price instead.

The sales chart

Below the KPI row is a chart plotting the same figures (sales, COGS, fees, shipping, expenses and profit) over time, bucketed by day or by month depending on how wide the selected period is. Use it to spot patterns, such as a good week followed by a quiet one, or a spike in fees that’s eating into a particular period’s profit, rather than relying on the single headline number alone.

Period pills: Today, 7D, 30D, Month, Year, All

The pills next to the dashboard heading control the date range every KPI and the chart are calculated over:

  • Today: from midnight to now.
  • 7D: the last 7 days.
  • 30D: the last 30 days.
  • Month: since the start of the current calendar month.
  • Year: since the start of the current calendar year.
  • All: every order and expense on record.

Switching pills recalculates all six KPIs and the chart for that window, and where there’s enough history, shows the change against the equivalent previous period (for example, this 7D window against the 7D window before it).

Ask DashVue can narrow the view further

Next to the period pills is an “Ask DashVue” option that lets you describe a date range or filter your view in plain English instead of using the pills. It’s covered in its own article, so this one sticks to the standard KPI and chart view.

Using the tour day to day

A quick habit worth building: check the dashboard on the Today or 7D pill each morning to see what sold and whether profit looks healthy, then switch to 30D or Month when you want a steadier read on how the business is trending, since single days can be noisy. Net Profit is the figure that matters most, but the breakdown underneath it (COGS, fees, shipping, expenses) is what tells you where to act if profit dips: a rising fees percentage, climbing shipping costs, or an expense you forgot to account for.

See the related articles below for more on filtering, orders and profit tracking.

Last updated 2026-07-04.

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