Where to find the settings
Open Balanik, go to the Costs tab and find the box called Email and background refresh. Only administrators see this box. Shop managers and viewers can’t change it.
Turn on the summary email
Tick Email me a profit summary.
Under How often, choose Every morning, for yesterday (around 07:00) or Monday mornings, for last week.
In Send to, enter the address that should get it. It starts as your site’s admin email.
To check delivery right away, tick Send a test email now.
Press Save. A note confirms when the email will arrive and in which time zone.
The email goes out around 07:00 in your reporting time zone. The weekly email arrives on Monday and covers Monday to Sunday of last week. After the first email, the box shows when it was last sent.
Sent by your own site. Your WordPress sends the email with its standard mail function (wp_mail), to the address you choose. It doesn’t pass through any Balanik server.
What the email contains
| Part | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Subject line | What you kept, and for which day or week. |
| What you kept | Yesterday’s estimated profit after ads (or last week’s), with a chip showing the change against the day or week before. |
| The numbers | Net revenue, orders, product, shipping and payment costs, ad spend and overhead. |
| Where you made it | Your top 3 products by profit. |
| Loss warning | A note if any product lost money after ads, pointing you to the action plan in Opportunities. |
| Connection notes | Any ad account that needs reconnecting, and any refresh that failed. |
A button at the bottom opens the dashboard. If some costs or ad imports are missing, the profit is left blank rather than guessed. The subject line then ends with “(some costs missing)”.
A broken ad connection shows up in the email, so you notice it without opening the dashboard. For example:
“Meta needs reconnecting (Balanik → Ad spend). Its spend may be missing.”
It catches up before sending
Before each email, Balanik imports new and changed orders. Then it refreshes the ad spend for the email’s period from each connected ad account and spend feed. That way the email uses the same numbers as the dashboard.
If a refresh fails, the email says so in a short line. If another import is running at that moment, the figures may lag a little, and the email tells you. The lines look like this:
- “A spend feed could not be refreshed.”
- “An import was already running, so the figures may be a little behind.”
Spend from the Google Ads Script arrives on the script’s own hourly schedule, so the catch-up doesn’t need to fetch it.
Hourly background refresh
Without it, Balanik only refreshes while someone has the dashboard open. To keep figures current around the clock, tick the box that starts Keep figures fresh in the background. Then press Save.
Once an hour, it does three things:
- Imports new and changed orders.
- Refreshes yesterday’s and today’s spend from each connected ad account.
- Refreshes yesterday’s and today’s spend from each spend feed.
If an import is already running, that hour is skipped. The refresh is off by default and works with or without the summary email. It runs every hour, which is not the same as real time.
Turn it off
Untick the boxes and press Save. With both off, nothing runs in the background. The email itself also says where to turn it off.
If the email doesn’t arrive
- Send a test. Tick Send a test email now and save. If you see “The test email could not be sent. Check that this site can send email.”, WordPress couldn’t hand the message over.
- Check your site’s email delivery. Many hosts don’t deliver WordPress mail reliably on their own. An SMTP plugin or an email sending service usually fixes this.
- Look in spam. A test that says it was sent but never arrives is often filtered.
- Allow for quiet sites. WordPress runs scheduled tasks when someone visits your site. On a site with few visitors, the email can arrive later than 07:00.