As an update to this issue, I’ve now found that the Shopify COGS report is virtually useless because it counts unpaid orders as if they’re products already sold.
40 or more percent of our sales value comes from orders created and fulfilled up to 2 months before we can claim payment under a contract, and some fulfilled and unpaid orders are returned (requiring the order to be changed), long before we can claim payment.
To boot, I’ve found that these days when a product is returned on an unpaid Shopify order, Shopify no longer substracts the returned item from the owed amount on the order, even after the return is “closed”, so the customer ends up owing twice as much in the case of an exchange on an as-yet-unpaid order. And the only way I know how to fix this is to duplicate the order, void the initial one, and change the new order to take the returned product out of the items appearing in the non-returned area of the new draft order.
I just can’t fathom how a company can be that stupid.
I don’t know how long this has been going on, because for months we’ve kept non-paid orders in Drafts just to avoid messing up our Amaka integration data, since that couldn’t handle changed orders of the fully fledged type. Now that we no longer use the Amaka integration, I’ve turned about 100 draft orders into proper orders, only to find that this no longer works as a way of doing business either, while it did while we were trying to use it that way in the early second half of last year.