Upload COGS securely to Reason Automation

This feature allows users of the Seller Profit Toolkit and Vendor Profit Toolkit to upload cost of goods sold (COGS) into the profit & loss data model. This data is stored securely and encrypted in your private Reason Automation database and is never transmitted to an Amazon server.

Preparing your COGS file

1. Columns for the upload file are: asin | date | COGS | currency_code.
2. The file must contain only unique SKU-date (month) combinations.
3. Analytics products use data at the monthly level, and rely on data existing for the first day of each month. So, your upload file should include asin-month pairs for every month where data exists. Here is a simple example covering 2 ASINs over a 5 month period:

3. If you don’t have COGS data for every ASIN-month combination, no problem - we automatically carry values forward for you until a new value is available. For example (green values are auto-created):

4. Note that we don’t populate ‘backwards in time’. Best practice here is to ensure a least one COGS value is present per ASIN for a data 3 years/37 months back (e.g. if it’s June 2026, ensure your upload file contains a COGS value for each ASIN with date May 2023 (2023-05-01)
5. If you want to keep things really simple - e.g. just have one COGS value for each ASIN across all data - simply upload a file with all ASINs and a single COGS value for each, for a date 37 months back from the current date, and that value will be carried forward for all subsequent months.

You can use a SQL query to help you create a starter file if desired.

How to upload your COGS file

Vendor and Seller Profit Toolkit dashboards will automatically integrate your uploaded COGS data for use in profitability reporting.

1. Log in to our client portal and browse to Manage Your Data > Upload Data. You should see the following (please reach out to us to request this function be activated if you do not see it):

2. To see an example file, click on the down arrow to download a sample template (CSV format). As noted above, the column headers should be: date, sku, COGS.
3. Save the completed file as a CSV (not an XLSX), and click or drag to upload to the portal.
4. Your COGS data will appear in your schema, in a table called seller_profit_cogs
5. It can take up to 24 hours for new COGS data to update in dashboards.

Notes for Excel users

1) Dates in the CSV need to be in YYYY-MM-DD format, but Excel will reformat them as mm/dd/yyyy when you open the file. Before saving your file as CSV for upload, make sure the dates column is switched back to YYYY-MM-DD format (in Excel ‘Format’ dropdown, select Category > Date and then '2012-03-01'

2) Excel often adds a blank row at the end of a CSV file, even if you delete blank rows. The uploader should deal with this automatically but if you get upload errors, check for the presence of a blank row at the bottom of the file using a text editor such as Notepad, delete it, and retry.

3) If you are uploading SKUs rather than ASINs, and have SKUs that are long numbers, Excel might turn these into scientific notation, causing an error when you go to upload because of duplicative SKU-date combinations. To set the right format for the SKU/ASIN column, select the Excel Format dropdown (it will likely say ‘General’), select More Number formats > Custom > 0 (see image below).

On this page

• Upload COGS securely to Reason Automation
• Preparing your COGS file
• How to upload your COGS file