Shopify has changed their Finance Summary Report! No longer a report!

[mscmith11]

Sometimes I wonder if @Shopify has anyone with an accounting background working for them.

They took the one and only somewhat helpful Analytics report, titled "Finance Summary" report and now is a series of colorful charts and graphs that are absolutely USELESS on an accounting and book-keeping level.

How is it that Shopify is continually making figures less transparent on their platform rather than the other way around. 

The "finance report" now shows a "Payments over time" line chart, visually showing the days in which sales rose or declined and a "Payments received" bar graph that visually shows which payments methods were used more or less.

NO. These are not necessary or helpful when entering numbers into an accounting program.  I know have to try and again pull numbers out of this ridiculous page that shows half as much information as previous.

There is no longer any gift card sales data or "Liabilities" section, and the "Total Payments" figure is also gone.

We need more practical, straight forward data, we don't need charts and graphs, however pretty they look.

Bring back the straight forward Finance Summary. Call this something else.

[mscmith11]

I tried this app, it was a mess. I honestly think even the 3rd party apps can't make sense of the reconciliation issues within Shopify.

QBO was the same.

[DMBookkeeping]

I so agree with your assessment.  As a bookkeeping firm with several Shopify clients.  This report is a must as we do manually enter monthly sales receipt and reconcile to the payouts.  Without this we are lost.  We can't justify another app payment to get these reports.  I don't see what is so hard for Shopify to provide some sort of monthly reconciliation report for bookkeeping purposes,  Please go back to the old reports ASAP.  I can't reconcile April reports because of this mess.

[mscmith11]

Thank you! I agree 100% on a bookkeeping angle!

[klosolutions]

We are frustrated because on almost 75% of our clients that we have collaborator access to - this report is completely blank.   It only brings up data for 2 of our clients.    This has all been since May 9.   I have been on the chat assistant with shopify 3 times now and they keep saying the issue is resolved .   Now they are trying to tell me that it is my collaborator access and that I just don't have the settings to see reports for my clients.   But I am telling them that we DO have these permissions set and have no problems seeing and running reports for several years with some of our clients and where able to up until they updated the format of it.   And I can run all the other reports under analytics and the data populates  - it is only the finance summary.   I have no idea how to refresh this and at least see it in the new format .   Most of my clients are on A2X  - but we still like to at month end do a 3 way reconciliation between QBO, A2X's finance summary ( for the previous month date range) and then Shopify's finance summary report.  This helps us detect or spot mappings errors or when we have a new payment gateway , etc that my client hasn't told us about.     We do have a few small micro clients, that we simply use the finance summary report for a month end JE to reports and breakdown sales, gross sales, refunds , discounts, etc and clear out the clearing accounts.     I am super frustrated with Shopify that you can't ever even talk to a live person - just chat.   

[DMBookkeeping]

Yes, I'm having that issue as well.  There are some clients, I can't finish because the report is blank.  Can't be permissions if you can view other reports which I can.  And on a couple clients I can view the Finance Summary and it is the same login same settings.  I have some really large clients so importing orders into QBO is too much so we do a monthly sales receipt from the Finance Summary.  Without it we don't know how to get the info.  What a mess.

[LeslieMathews]

I hate that I have to write the date on the print out now, because when I print the next business day - the date prints out as "yesterday." I did go ahead and customize three reports for ALL and three reports for my retail store: Total Sales Breakdown, Gross Profit Breakdown and Payments by Gateway - all without the hourly & daily listing. It is still a chore to open, change the date, apply, print, then discard changes and exit back to the reports page to start the next one. *Sigh*

[petgrocer]

This is driving me crazy as well. Obviously developers making things up that don't make sense in the real world use by the users.

[klosolutions]

Just FYI on the shopify finance report issue - they were able to narrow down the problem for us.   We have collloborator access and for some reason a lot of our clients we didn't have the "dashboards" permission under analytics checked on and only had reports.   It didn't matter before the new updated report format and we could see all the reports - but with the new format - you have to have dashboard permission turned on to see it.   So we had to request from our clients for them to edit our permissions and make sure "dashboards" under analytics was checked on.    That solved the problem and now we can see the report and it isn't blank for us.    It is tedious as we had to go thru almost our entire client list and request they all do this for us - but it works now

[RMGBC]

Hey what did you end up doing? Were you able to reconcile your clients' accounts? 

[LeslieMathews]

We have Shopify Plus and I am always able to talk to a real person - it still hasn't been of any use. Their only recourse is to notify the developers that we are seeking changes.

[klosolutions]

Maybe because I myself am not a store owner - we are an accounting firm with shopify partner dashboard and access our clients shopify stores ( ranging from basic to advanced to plus ) ...so maybe that is why I can't get a live person because I am not the store owner

- idk.

[saweems]

I was super frustrated when I found this report missing. I only use it to split the total sales into the payment type because I add sales to QBO manually, at the end of the month, after organizing them as needed for the monthly sales tax entry. After some digging, I did find that the payment by gateway report will show me what I need. I removed most of the unneeded dimensions as I really just need the totals by gift card, shopify payments and cash. Now, I've saved that as a custom report so it will be simpler next month but hopefully this helps someone that is frustrated by the change like I was. 

[bookkeeper]

Absolutely agree — this has been a frustration for many merchants who rely on Shopify's reporting for real accounting and reconciliation.

That’s exactly where Bookkeep can be a game-changer. Bookkeep focuses on what actually matters: accurate, automated accounting entries.

Bookkeep pulls detailed financial data directly from Shopify and posts daily summarized journal entries into your accounting system (like QuickBooks Online, Xero or Zoho Books). This includes:

• Taxes collected and withheld, broken down by tax rate

• Sales and refunds, including line-item detail if needed

• Payment breakdown by type (Shopify Payments, PayPal, etc.)

• Gift card sales and redemptions 

• Shipping income and duties 

• Accounts receivable handling — if an order is unpaid or repaid later, it tracks that too

Bookkeep is designed by accountants, for accountants — with practical automation that eliminates manual spreadsheet work and the risk of human error.

Totally hear your frustration — this is why tools like Bookkeep exist, to bridge the gap between dashboards and real financial operations.

[mscmith11]

That's all fine and dandy and we all realize there is another and another 3rd party app that can provide X,Y and Z. But we are talking about basic requirements of an ecommerce platform. If you can't even give me the basic financial reports, what good is it.  @Shopify seems to be withholding more and more information from the merchants if you ask me.

[Sonya153]

I'm convinced these forums exist only for apps & developers to flog their product

[DonnaCT]

The Finance Summary was a fantastic report until these thoughtless changes were made.  We use individual channels to sort sales by locations for purposes of sales tax, commission calculations and reconciling cash received.  It was easy to sort the report by period and by channel.  From there it was easy to click on a line item (total sales, gift cards) and export that data to excel.  All of that is gone.  Chat support tells me to set up custom reports to do each of these simple steps.  Shopify fixed something that wasn't broken.  I cannot find a report to show payments received for each of our individual channels.  Our month-end process has to be revamped and employees retrained.  The cost is additional labor hours on our end, while our monthly Shopify fee stays the same. May is going to be ugly.  

To print the new and unimproved Shopify Finance Summary report, right-click on it and select print.

[mscmith11]

You can right click and print, but that doesn't really change anything except for getting it on paper sadly.

[rw99]

The developers at Shopify look at the screen and think WOW the graphs looks perfect and pretty. Our customers should love it and my job is done. These idiots have zero financial skill. Where is the fxxking print function? You can't even print or export the page. If you navigate to the outstanding gift card report, then you found it's missing the sold gift card column, so it's not balance. You can't be serious to roll out changes like this. Bring the old "Finances Summary Report" back! 

[mscmith11]

Yup, exactly, all you can do is "print screen" SMH!  And the worst part after 80 comments and 2300 views is that @Shopify has not even responded to our concerns. Sorry, I should not use the word concerns. They straight up have again managed to have stolen valuable information from its merchants without ANY WARNING, making our lives that much more difficult. @Shopify you do realize this is of the utmost concern right???! I always wonder if this is simply a ploy to have us sign up for another 3rd party app or if it was just a major oversight? Please let us know @Shopify 

[FBbookkeeping]

So frustrating! Shopify please bring back the old reporting style for the finance summary. I use this report monthly as a bookkeeper- this is the main report we use for our clients since it included everything we needed- sales info, payment types, gift cards, etc. Why are all the report options trash and the one that did provide everything is now poof gone! The new reporting setup is confusing and fragmented, unable to export or even copy it into an excel sheet (all info just goes into one column), and there’s no real report alternative. I don’t understand why the most functional report was the one removed. Please bring it back, Shopify, this change has made our jobs significantly harder.

[esmeraldallc]

AGREED 100%. Now is more complicated and time consuming. 

And, in terms of the Inventory transfer between locations, now, the process is extremely long and confusing. 

Old Proces: Create transfe> Save> Pending transfer> Receive transfer>Accept all

New Process: Create transfer> Save> Ready to Ship> Save> Create Shipment> Save. Mark as in transit> Receive Shipment> Accept All> Accept And Save

WHAATTTTTT!!!!

[poordavids]

Seriously, this is SO frustrating. I have to pull like 8 different reports now just to reconcile everything. The numbers always have discrepancies every single month. Shopify reporting is the worst, and 100% agree about the useless charts.

[AndrewCeltic]

Wow, it's actually funny how disconnected they are with what the average Shopify user needs when it comes to reporting. Over 150 customized comparitive reports and SQL query based report builders yet the most fundamental and useful reports they decided to removed and restrict. Absolutely absurd!

Total Sales and Financial Summary, two of the most basic reports obliterated for what?!

[petgrocer]

THIS. @Shopify pay attention to your users!

[Sonya153]

What exactly are our options without the Finances Summary report? I provided this report to my bookkeeper at the end of each quarter so that total sales through shopify could be balanced off against Direct Deposits, Paypal Settlement & Afterpay Settlement. 

What would I use now to find:

Gross Sales, Discounts, Taxes Collected & Payment methods?

[PaulNewton]

To really champion against behavior like this merchants would need to get enough stock to submit questions on earning calls, etc.

Or get a big enough petition of provable shopify merchants.

But most merchants do not interoperate with each other thus this will continue; tragedy of the commons and all that but even more ego-centric/capitalistic.

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@mscmith11 wrote:

The "finance report" now shows a "Payments over time" line chart, visually showing the days in which sales rose or declined and a "Payments received" bar graph that visually shows which payments methods were used more or less.

---

"visually" is the keyword, it looks good in lobby tvs, marketing videos , in investor bait etc.

I wonder if reports the is the new live-view of merchant-annoyance where every year right before black-friday they'd drastically alter the live-view confusing merchants on what's possibly the most important sales day of the year like they were mocking merchants on purpose.

More and more merchants are paying for the privilege of being the product AND the guinea pigs in an opaque process.

Notice how these rollouts are done with no notice, no opt-in & no opt-out or version freeze.

No built in feedback mechanism with even a simple thumbs up/down in the UI.

Because a forum post with less than 10,000 merchants is a blip.

A blip that will get ignored, or pandered to, on a platform with millions of merchants that rolls out operations disruptions with no voting process rofl.

Meanwhile it seems like there are thousands upon thousands of growing posts like this heading towards a trust thermocline.

[CMojo]

I would certainly sign a petition. But like most of us, don't have the time
to set it up.

[MAD2017]

I would certainly sign!!!!

[MAD2017]

I agree. What is the solution? We ALL need to come together!

[mscmith11]

No one at @Shopify has addressed this. Customer service can do absolutely nothing.

Anyone have ideas? Online petition can possibly be noticed? Pretty sad state of affairs that the company shuts down a basic report to its high paying customers and we get ZERO RESPONSE. Super disappointing.

Facebook post? threads? One that someone will respond to?

[PaulNewton]

You need to @ the ceos on twitter, linked in etc.

Figure out who the product lead is for the reports team silo and @ them etc etc etc.

If the store is on a shopifyPlus plan and you somehow still have an MSM(yet another removed feature)  that's who's inbox you should be nuking.

Corps processes have become perversely incentivized to ignore customer complains requiring public shaming to fix things they broke.

💰📈 Or really have enough shares to maybe get a private meet, or enough for a question on an earnings call but when you got that many shares your probably not gonna care about things like features working.

Shopify opaqueness is and has been broken for merchants for a long time, the support system getting gutted is just another symptom.

But just as broken is how unconsolidated merchants are, give it a month or two and this topic will be a desert like so many others.

So guard your time wisely and stingily.

"It's Basic!" Rhetoric,

Avoid ever framing something like this as "basic feature" is was an existing fundamental feature that was then broken.

You were paying for it now it's gone, it is not "basic".

Everything is a "basic feature" feature to someone on a platform with MILLIONS of merchants.

So "basic" is a silly argument to base a complaint on as it's built on a ground of communal ego's false expectations.

Search for forums for all the off the wall feature requests where the complainer thinks their specific needs are of the upmost importance and "basic".

It's makes it a dismissible argument for a billion dollar company.

Good luck your gonna need it.

[myshoppie]

Are there any plans to bring back old Finances Summary Report.  We all hate the new layout especially our accountant.  Does shopify not care that everyone prefers efficiency over visual appeal?  I have never commented on anything in my life and felt the need to do so in this case.  

[petgrocer]

I had opened a thread as a feature request to make the report printable to pdf again, like it used to be. Had lots of comments on it. Like many of my posts, Shopify has deleted it.

I will post on this one instead - requesting yet again that we get a printable option for our financial summary report. I further request that shopify show the loss or gain in cash rounding from the POS, like any actual real accounting would expect to show.

I further request, that since we have to now use our browser print option to print our daily sales, in order to transfer MANUALLY into quickbooks online (because Shopify brutally destroyed my entire accounting system when I set the app to transfer the data, so now it's manually), please put the ACTUAL DATE on each financial summary report instead of 'yesterday' or 'today'. That date doesn't help me when I am looking at this report two months from now. I need the actual date. The only people who set things up like this are people who DO NOT USE THE SYSTEM.

I am so disgusted that my thread is gone, again, and fed up with Shopify.