Before you start
- WordPress 6.5 or newer, with WooCommerce 9 or newer active.
- PHP 8.1 or newer, with the OpenSSL extension. Most hosts have both.
- A MySQL or MariaDB database using InnoDB, which is the standard for WordPress.
- An administrator account. Connecting ad accounts needs an administrator; shop managers can view the reports.
Try it on staging first if you can. Balanik only reads your orders and never changes them, but a backup is good practice before installing any plugin.
Install the plugin
Start the free trial or buy Pro. Freemius, our reseller, emails you the download link and your licence key.
In WordPress, open Plugins → Add New Plugin → Upload Plugin, choose the ZIP file and press Install Now. If the plugin asks for your licence key, paste the one from the email.
Press Activate. An Balanik item appears in your admin menu.
When you first activate it, Balanik saves your WooCommerce currency and your WordPress time zone as its reporting currency and time zone.
The four setup steps
Open Balanik and go to the Setup tab. The guided setup has four steps. Nothing changes until you save.
1. Your store
Check the reporting currency and time zone. Reports exclude tax and include processing, completed and refunded orders. A refund lowers revenue on the day you refund it, not on the day of the order.
2. Your costs
Add your shipping cost, your payment fee (a percentage plus a fixed fee per order), any other per-order cost, and your running costs. Use amounts excluding tax you can reclaim. Product costs come from the cost saved on each order line; see Product costs if you don’t record them yet.
3. Import and connect
Press Import orders to bring in your orders. Then connect the ad accounts you use, or import a CSV of your ad spend. If you don’t advertise, skip this part.
4. Review
Open an order explanation to check where each cost came from. If you run ads, assign your campaigns to the products they promote, so each product’s profit after ads is right.