Documentation
Everything Ballast can answer, and what each answer means.
1. Upload your orders
Ballast works from an export of your own orders — there is no app to install and no store connection. In your Shopify admin open Orders → Export, save the CSV, and upload it to Ballast. Until an export is uploaded, Ballast will ask you to upload one rather than answer with data. Upload several stores under different names to roll figures up across all of them.
2. What you can ask
Ballast ships with these starting points, and understands natural variations of them:
- “Which of my Shopify money will not appear in a Shopify payout?”
- “Show last month's sales by payment gateway.”
- “Break down my multi-currency orders in my home currency.”
- “Export last month's revenue and refunds to Excel.”
- “How much tax did I collect last quarter?”
If you do not specify a period, Ballast uses the last 30 days and tells you so.
3. What each answer means
| Ask about… | Ballast reports |
|---|---|
| Settlement / off-ledger money | Money captured by each gateway, and which streams settle outside Shopify Payments and so will not appear in a Shopify payout. Each off-ledger amount is named by gateway for you to reconcile with that provider. |
| Sales by gateway | Revenue captured through each payment method over the period. |
| Currency breakdown | Order values in both presentment currency and your home currency, kept strictly separate. |
| Refund detail | Refund totals set against the order they came from. (An orders export gives refund totals, not line-item breakdowns.) |
| Revenue summary | Gross, discounts, shipping, tax, and net for the period. |
| Tax collected | Tax collected, summarised for the period. |
| Store rollup | Figures rolled up across all connected stores, or drilled into one. |
| Connection status | Which stores are connected and the period covered by the current data. |
| Export | Any of the above as a formatted Excel workbook. |
4. How the numbers are produced
Every figure Ballast reports is computed by a deterministic engine, not by a language model. Money is handled with integer (minor-unit) math so there is no floating-point drift, currencies are never mixed, and each figure traces back to the order and gateway identifiers it came from. When a value is unavailable, Ballast says so rather than estimating.
5. Scope of v1
Ballast v1 reports revenue and settlement from your order data. It does not perform a bank-account reconciliation of Shopify Payments payouts; that is planned for a later version. Ballast is a reporting tool, not accounting or tax advice — see the Terms of Use.
6. Privacy
Ballast stores no customer personal data and only ever reads your store. Full detail in the Privacy Policy.