cost-allocation-analysis

To calculate per-order profitability, you allocate COGS, per-order fulfillment, channel marketing, and shared overhead costs down to the SKU and order level. This requires joining time-effective product cost records and per-order fulfillment data by order date for point-in-time accuracy.

For accurate historical cost allocation, preserve past costs by recording effective_from and effective_to date ranges for your product costs. This ensures past orders keep the exact fulfillment, marketing, and COGS rates that applied when they originally shipped.

The best way to rank SKU profitability is to compute fully-loaded contribution margins by distributing shipping proportionally by weight and allocating overhead across products. This reveals unprofitable SKUs that gross margin calculations often hide.

Yes, this cost allocation approach works with custom SQL databases and e-commerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. It provides schema and SQL design guidance to join costs by order date and perform allocation validation checks.

Yes, you need integer-cent monetary storage to perform precise unit economics and cost allocation queries. This storage method prevents floating-point rounding errors when distributing shared overhead and fulfillment costs across multiple orders and SKUs.

Missing allocations or anomalous overhead rates occur when cost records lack proper effective date ranges or fail reconciliation checks. You can detect these by running validation queries that ensure all four cost buckets are fully distributed across products, channels, and orders.