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Automated Monthly P&L

Analytics/Automated Monthly P&L.md
sharedUpdated Aug 23, 2026

Automated Monthly P&L

Purpose

An automatically-generated monthly profit & loss statement, reconciling internal records against Paddle and hosting costs — not just a dashboard number, an actual reconciled report.

Formula

Revenue:  Platform fees collected (from internal platform_fees table)
Costs:    Paddle processing fees
        + Hosting/infra costs
        + AI/token costs (AI / Token Usage Tracking)
        + Other SaaS costs (Clerk, monitoring, etc.)

P&L = Revenue − Costs

New Cost Line: Paddle's Own Processing Fees (gap closed 2026-08-04)

Every prior split-math example (Commission Engine, Money Flow) modeled only SellVia's 2% platform fee — Paddle's own processing fee (roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per charge, varies by card/region) was never accounted for anywhere until now. This comes out of SellVia's revenue, not the customer's or merchant's side of the split — actual margin per sale is thinner than the 2% figure alone suggests. This report is where that gets made visible and tracked properly.

Data Sources and Automation Level

SourcePulled viaAutomation
Platform fee revenueInternal platform_fees tableFully automatic
Paddle processing feesPaddle's Balance Transactions API (fee field per transaction)Fully automatic
Hosting costsHosting provider's billing API, where available (e.g. DigitalOcean exposes one; a bare Hetzner box may not cleanly)Automatic where supported, manual entry fallback otherwise
AI/token costsInternal ai_usage_events tableFully automatic
Other SaaS (Clerk, monitoring, etc.)Most providers don't expose billing APIsManual monthly entry — realistic limitation, not a gap to pretend away

Process (Celery scheduled job, monthly)

  1. On the 1st of each month, job runs for the prior month
  2. Pull Paddle Balance Transactions for the period (revenue + Paddle's fees)
  3. Reconcile against internal sales/platform_fees records first (extends 05. Payments → Reconciliation — the existing fraud/discrepancy check now also feeds this report) — the P&L should never be built on unreconciled numbers
  4. Pull hosting costs (API where available, manual entry table otherwise)
  5. Sum AI/token costs from ai_usage_events
  6. Compute and store the P&L as a row in a new monthly_pnl_reports table
  7. Surface in the Admin dashboard (10. Operations → Admin Panel, 11. Analytics → Dashboards)

Manual Cost Entry (for the non-API-able sources)

A simple Admin-only form/table for entering monthly costs that can't be pulled automatically (Clerk subscription, monitoring tools, etc.) — not full automation, but keeps the P&L complete rather than silently missing real costs just because they're harder to fetch programmatically.

Open Questions

  • Exact hosting provider choice (Hetzner vs. DigitalOcean, still open per 06. Infrastructure → Hosting Strategy) determines how much of the hosting line can actually be automated — worth weighing billing-API support as a real factor in that decision, not just price/region
  • Whether the report needs to be finalized/locked once generated (so historical P&L doesn't silently change if a late-arriving adjustment comes in) — recommend a "finalized" flag with a separate adjustment entry for anything discovered after the fact, rather than editing a closed month in place

Update (2026-08-23): Paddle Removed, Swich Confirmed, Pakistan/PKR Only

Founder decisions, full reasoning in 02. Architecture Decision Log. Every "Paddle" above means Swich now:

  • Formula: "Paddle processing fees" → "Swich processing fees." Same principle (a real cost line separate from SellVia's 2% platform fee) — exact rate unconfirmed pending a real Swich signup conversation, so the "roughly 2.9% + $0.30 per charge" figure above is Paddle's, not a verified Swich number; don't carry it forward as an estimate.
  • Data source table: "Paddle's Balance Transactions API (fee field per transaction)" → Swich's equivalent transaction/fee API — exact endpoint unconfirmed.
  • monthly_pnl_reports.paddle_fees_cents is renamed swich_fees_cents (03. Table Specifications, updated same date).
  • "Other SaaS (Clerk, monitoring, etc.)" — Clerk itself is stale here too, unrelated to this update: auth switched to Ory Kratos back on 2026-08-04 (02. Architecture Decision Log); this line should read "Ory Kratos (if paid tier), monitoring, etc."
  • Currency: PKR only, not USD — all figures in this report are PKR.

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