What the Refunds metric is
Refunds are the money that actually left your account when you refunded customers, tax included.
It matches the Refunded payments column in Shopify Admin → Analytics, day for day.
Refunds and Returns measure different things
Your Dashboard has both. They are not two views of the same number.
Metric | What it measures | Matches in Shopify |
Returns | Value removed from orders — refunds, returns, cancellations, and order edits | Sales reversals |
Refunds | Cash that actually left your account | Refunded payments |
The relationship between the two differs from store to store, depending on how your orders change after they are placed. Neither number can be worked out from the other.
Don't add them together. They describe the same events on two different axes, so adding them counts the same thing twice.
Where you'll find it
Refunds are available on:
Dashboard — pin it from Add metrics, under Others. It also appears in the Others summary card.
Custom metrics — you can use it in your own formulas.
Email reports — add it when you create or edit a report.
Mobile app and widgets
Export Dashboard — this is where you see it day by day.
It follows your Dashboard filters and date range like any other metric.
It is not on the P&L Report, in the Net Profit Breakdown, or in the P&L export. Those describe how your profit is built, and Refunds is not part of that calculation.
When it's recorded
Set this in Settings → Calculation Preferences → Recording date → Refunds.
Setting | What happens |
Refund date (default) | The refund counts on the day it was processed. Matches Shopify. |
Order date | The refund moves back to the original order's date, and TrueProfit restates that past period. |
What this row does not control
The Recording date rows work independently. Changing Refunds changes only the Refunds metric — your Returns figure and every other metric stays exactly as it was.
The same is true in reverse: changing the Returns row does not move your Refunds number.
If you choose Order date
Your Refunds figure no longer lines up with Shopify day by day. Shopify always records a refund on the day it was processed.
A refund whose original order date can't be determined is not counted at all, rather than being guessed into a date.
The change applies to every period you have already recorded, not just new refunds. Switching back restores the previous values.
What isn't covered
Refunds are not part of your profit. It does not appear in Revenue, Net Profit, Total Sales, or Gross Profit. You can still use it in a custom metric of your own.
It is an amount, not a count. It does not tell you how many refunds you issued or how many items came back.
There is no drill-down to individual refunds. The figure is a total.
Day-by-day values are in the Export Dashboard only — there is no Refunds line on the performance chart.
In a different display currency, amounts are converted using the rate of the day the refund happened.