Frequently Asked Questions

Creating a project allows you to easily store all the required settings to generate a set of reports in one place; we recommend that for every ecommerce site you report on, you create a separate project. You can then retain all settings and column mappings for each report you generate in that project. Column mappings can be overridden for each report created but certain settings can only be changed at the project level.

This depends on your account plan; you can see full details in the account plan section of your account. You can edit the settings for, or entirely delete a project at any time.

Yes, if your account plan supports this, you can invite additional users to your project. You can control permissions for any user from the project they've been added to give granular access to view, schedule and delete reports as well as edit project settings. You can remove a user from a project at any time and indeed, a user can remove themselves at any time from a project also.

To make our service as compatible as possible with all ecommerce platforms, we opted for the most universally available file format we could think of for order exports; the trusty CSV file. The majority of ecommerce platforms (including Magento and Shopify) support CSV exports out of the box and even if your platform doesn't, the chances are you've had to add CSV export functionality in order to integrate with another system. CSV files are certainly not glamorous, but they're ideal for this purpose.

Ideally your CSV file should contain one line per order and run in date order (either oldest to newest, or newest to oldest). If your CSV contains multiple lines per order, our system will handle this automatically for you (taking the first line for each order from your file) but these lines will count against the order row limit for your account plan. Remember, you can manipulate your CSV file before you upload it if you wish to change the file order or remove any order rows manually yourself.

The essential columns we need to process your file are 'Order ID', 'Order Date', 'Order Value', and 'Customer ID' ('Customer ID' can be any customer identifier, such as the customer email address).

No, as long as your CSV has a header row you can just map the required columns to any column in your CSV when you schedule your report. You can also save these mappings against your project so they're pre-populated next time.

Our engine imports one CSV file per upload, however you can combine CSV files on your system easily before uploading. On a Windows PC simply:

• Press the Windows Key + R to open the Run prompt
• Type "cmd" to open a Command prompt
• Use "cd" to navigate to the folder where your multiple CSV files reside
• Use the command "copy *.csv combined.csv" to create one CSV file with the data from all other CSV files combined
• Don't worry if there are multiple column header rows within your CSV, our system will automatically ignore these when processing your report

To ensure 100% compatibility with our reporting engine, only column headings containing standard ASCII characters can be selected during the report scheduling process. If you wish to select a column heading containing non-ASCII characters, you can either edit the column heading before uploading your CSV file, or update your project settings to allow us to automatically strip any non-ASCII characters in column headings when you upload your file.

This restriction does not affect any of the order data within your CSV rows, only the column headings.

That's really up to you, but we'd recommend you upload as much data as possible. 2 years is normally a sensible minimum period when looking at Customer Lifetime Revenue and similar metrics, but you can absolutely upload a longer time period.

Yes, when scheduling your report you can exclude by order status (e.g. you may wish to exclude cancelled orders), order channel, or by customer ID (e.g. you may wish to exclude any orders placed by your internal staff). You can even remove all orders placed before and/or after a particular date from your report during the report scheduling process. You can of course just remove any order rows you don't want to include in your report from your CSV file before you upload it too.

Any orders with an order value of 0 or less will automatically be excluded from the import process. In addition, any months with zero orders and revenue will be excluded from charts and tables in your report.

We support every world currency. When creating a project, you set the default currency for the reporting (e.g. what currency the Customer Lifetime Revenue is shown in). If your order export contains a 'Currency Code' column (ISO 4217 format), we'll convert orders in other currencies to your default currency at the prevailing exchange rate before processing them.

No, we can interpret pretty much any order date from your CSV. When creating your project there is the option to force either a US or European interpretation of the date and we even support dates in a UNIX timestamp format.

The Custom Columns feature allows you to report on other data in your order export CSV file; we'll generatea variety of additonal tables and chart for this data. Typically our users may use this on columns like 'Payment Method', 'Shipping Method' and so on to get a beautiful visual representation of the performance of different options in these areas. Reports on 'Custom Columns' can only be generated if the column you specify contains at least 2 and no more than 250 distinct values.

Throughout the project and report creation process, you'll find help icons next to each field. Click these help icons for detailed information and guidance on the individual setting in question.

We use background robots to generate the reports, and most reports are typically completed within a few minutes. Reports from paid account plans are prioritised above reports from our free plan and the higher the account plan of the owner of the report project, the more priority is given to the report generation.

Yes, all chart data can be exported as a PNG image, SVG image or CSV file, and all table data can be exported as a CSV, Excel or PDF file.

Some of the custom columns you want to report on may not have the most presentable names; the solution is simply to change the name of the column header in your CSV before you upload it.

In short, yes. When your report is processed, we convert your CSV into temporary database tables which are used to generate your report. As soon as your report generation is complete, these temporary tables and your order CSV file are permanently deleted from our systems. However, if you wish to anonymise all customer data contained in the report, there is an option to do this at the project level during the project creation process. This will not affect the other data generated in the report in any way.

Yes! This is where RFM Calc can be even more powerful if you have some Excel skills; you can absolutely add more columns to your CSV before you upload it and our system will process this for you. For example, one of our favourites is adding a column to determine if the order was shipped to the billing address or delivery address; this can help identify where you have spikes in gift purchases and also give you an overall figure for the importance of allowing customers to ship to a different address.

In Excel, you can add another column with a header like 'Shipped to Billing Address' then use the formula =IF(ISNA(MATCH(I2,J2,0)), "No", "Yes") where I2 is the billing address and J2 is the shipping address. Then when you upload your CSV, just include 'Shipped to Billing Address' as a Custom Column and we'll do the rest.

Click here to learn more about our Custom Column reports

As of RFM Calc 2.0, reports are no longer generated as static sharable report files, as each report section can be independently accessed within your account. All reports now require at least a free RFM Calc account to access; if your account plan supports additional users, you can add additional users to your project via your project settings at any time.

As part of the report generation process, on selected account plans we'll generate a CSV file containing all your customers (1 customer per line) along with key data about these customers.

This data can be extremely powerful and can be used in a variety of ways; for example you could generate an email list segment to target particular customers, or create a custom audience from the list to target selected customers via paid search/social advertising.

The full customer CSV export is generated automatically with your ecommerce report for accounts on all paid account plans.

The customer CSV file we generate contains the following columns:

• Customer ID
• Customer First Name
• Customer Last Name
• Customer Combined Name (First Name and Last Name combined in one column)
• Customer Company
• Customer Email
• Customer Phone
• Customer Region
• Customer Country
• Orders Placed
• Total Spend (Converted if necessary to the default project currency)
• Average Spend per Order
• First Order Date
• Last Order Date
• Last Order Spend
• Predicted Next Order Date
• Predicted Next Order Spend
• Customer Has Lapsed (See below)
• Recency Score, Frequency Score, Monetary Score (all based on the generated RFM boundaries for your report)
• Overall RFM Score (Recency * Frequency * Monetary)
• Standard RFM Segment (S1 to S10 based on the overall RFM score segmented across your full customer base)
• Custom RFM Segment (If you've set these up for your project)
• Custom Column Values (We'll show any custom column values for the first and last order a customer placed)

We define a lapsed customer as one who's predicted next order date has passed the date of the newest order in your order file. We don't use the current real world date to define this as a customer could have placed an order in the period between the latest order date in your CSV file and the date you upload the file, but of course our systems have absolutely no way to know this.

There are 4 paid account plans available in addition to our free plan; you can see full a full list of differences between our plans in the account plan section of your account or a summary in the pricing section on our home page.

Yes! Our free plan will always be free and supports all our core report types; you can give the free plan a try for a long as you like before upgrading your account.

All our payments are collected via the leading and secure payment gateway Stripe

You can make payment using all major credit and debit cards, as well as supported bank transfer methods and special payment methods such as Link and Klarna. As a UK based company, all payments are charged in GBP.

Yes; with our billing portal you can change or cancel your account plan at any time. If you cancel your plan, you'll automatically be downgraded to our free plan immediately. But don't worry, you can upgrade your account again at any time. Please note that due to the nature of our service, we're not able to offer any refunds for cancelled plans.

If you downgrade your account and are left with (for example) more projects in your account than your new account plan supports, we'll automatically delete any projects over the limit defined for your new account plan, starting with the oldest project first.

Yes, you can delete your entire account at any time via your account dashboard. Please note that all data will be removed and we will not issue any refund for the remainder of any paid subscription if you delete your account. If you wish to just cancel your paid plan but retain your account, you can do this easily via our billing portal.

When your report is processed, we convert your CSV into temporary database tables which are used to generate your report. As soon as your report generation is complete, these temporary tables and your order CSV file are permanently deleted from our systems. If your account plan allows you to download a complete customer CSV file, we'll generate this at the same time. This is stored securely but for privacy reasons, it's automatically removed from our systems after 7 days.

Yes, if you wish to anonymise all customer data contained in the report, there is an option to do this at the project level during the project creation process. This will not affect the other data generated in the report in any way.

Yes, in multiple ways. Firstly, we do not collect any information directly from your customers, so any data collection will be covered by your existing GDPR policy. Secondly, we provide the option to anonymise all customer data when creating a report. Finally, there is no requirement to upload any personally identifiable information to us at all, you can anonymise customer ID values before uploading any order file (you will need to first perform this action on your CSV file before uploading it to us) which will not affect the numeric report data generated in any way.

Not at this time, however this is certaintly something we may incorporate in future.