Getting started with Margins

Margins pulls together everything you sell through and everything you spend on, reconciles it against your banks and payouts, and turns it into numbers you can question, chart, and share.

That reconciliation is the point. Most AI tools answer from whatever you paste into them, which means the answer is only as good as the file you happened to grab. Margins answers from your live data, tied back to your sources of truth, so when it tells you a SKU is losing money on TikTok, that's a number you can act on rather than one you have to go check.

Setup is one pass: create your account, connect your accounts, and let the first sync run. From there Margins keeps itself current.

This article covers the whole thing: creating your account, connecting your data, finishing setup, getting your first answers, and the two habits that keep your numbers right after week one.

In this article

Margins asks four quick questions first so your workspace is set up for the way you actually sell.

You'll land straight in the connection wizard, with your name in the top corner. That's your workspace created.

The wizard walks you through five groups of connections in order, and shows your progress across the top ①: Stores, Billing & Payments, Advertising Platforms, Backoffice & EDI, and Banks & Cards.

Each group answers a different question about your business.

To connect one, click its card and sign in to that platform when it opens. Then:

Click Next through each group, and Skip past anything you don't use. Nothing here is permanent, you can add or remove a channel or a bank later from your account settings.

Connecting isn't the same as finishing. Margins can only see what you connect it to. If your ad spend runs through an account you skipped, your margins will look better than they are, so it's worth connecting everything in one sitting rather than adding things piecemeal.

When you finish the wizard you'll see We have started syncing your data. Margins is pulling your history from every account you connected and building your dashboard from it.

This can take a couple of hours and up to a day if you have a lot of history. You don't need to stay on the page, refresh, or start over. Sections marked Syncing fill themselves in.

Click Explore Margins to go in and look around while it runs. Numbers will be partial until the sync completes, which is expected.

Once your data has landed, Finish setup in the left sidebar is where you get your data from "connected" to "trustworthy." It has three stages, and a Data accuracy meter ① that runs from Needs work to Excellent.

Confirms your connections are in and importing. If Margins spots activity from an app you haven't connected, like a payout from a channel it can't see, or a card it doesn't have, it flags it in the next stage rather than quietly leaving a hole in your numbers.

This is the stage that moves the meter. Items to review lists the things Margins couldn't confirm on its own, each with an honest time estimate, most are 3 to 5 minutes ②. Typical items:

Your score runs Needs work → Strong → Advanced → Excellent, and it reflects how complete and accurate your data is rather than how much you've used Margins. Click the information icon on the card for the full scale.

See Finishing setup and clearing your review items.

When this stage says Your data is ready, your dashboards can be trusted. It offers two ways in: Explore Dashboards and Connect MCP.

There are three ways to ask Margins something, and most people end up using all three.

Dashboard in the sidebar opens on Home, with Lifetime value, Spend analysis, and SKU analysis beside it ①. You dashboard may not show all four of these tabs, depending on your specific account setup. Set Period and Compared to at the top and everything below moves together ②. Alongside your own numbers you'll see peer comparisons (Peer growth ③) next to your growth, Peers AOV next to your average order value, so a good month has context.

Connect AI, at the top right of the dashboard, connects Margins to Claude, ChatGPT, or another AI tool through MCP, so you can work with your numbers in the chat you already have open. This is worth doing early, it's the fastest route from "the data is in" to "the data is useful," and it's how most people build custom reports and dashboards without building anything.

Three questions worth asking first:

Connect your Margins data to any workflow tool like Claude Scheduled, n8n, or Zapier and build custom workflows like automated slack alerts or email summaries, or build custom dashboards that track the metrics that mean the most for your business.

Margins keeps your connections syncing on its own. Two things stay yours, and both take minutes rather than hours.

Keep your transactions categorized. Margins categorizes most of what comes through automatically and leaves the rest for you. Anything it couldn't place shows up in Transactions. Left alone, uncategorized spend quietly distorts your profit and your peer comparisons.

Keep your product costs current. When a vendor price changes, add the new cost with the date it starts applying to Margins or just update Shopify and we'll sync this data automatically. Margins keeps the old costs for the units that sold under it, so your history stays right.

As more data lands, more of Margins turns on: peer benchmarks get sharper, period-over-period comparisons get real, and the SKU-level margins that were noisy in week one settle down.