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Metrics type: Key Metrics • Category: Ecommerce Platform
The killer reconciliation finding for mid-market ecom ops: dollar value of orders that never made it to Business Central GL plus the reason.

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At a glance

The dollar value of commerce-platform revenue that has not yet hit the Business Central General Ledger, broken down by reason. Calculated as commerce_total_revenue minus business_central_revenue_booked_gl for the same window, with reason codes attached to each missing dollar.

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Calculation

Calculated automatically from your Microsoft Dynamics 365 data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.

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Worked example

A US wholesale apparel distributor (annual revenue ~$70M) running Business Central in a single tenant with Microsoft 365 E5. Connected commerce platforms: Shopify Plus DTC, BigCommerce B2B with Net-30 terms, Adobe Commerce wholesale portal. The 30-day window covers 14 Mar 26 to 12 Apr 26. Reason breakdown the card surfaces: Five things to notice:
  1. The biggest leak is Released-Not-Invoiced ($392K). This is not lost revenue, it is stuck working capital. Shipping has happened, customer is on the hook, but no Posted Sales Invoice means no Customer Ledger Entry, no DSO clock, and no GL booking. The card lets the Controller drill into the SO list and chase Operations to post the invoices.
  2. Unmapped Marketplace ($48K) is real revenue at risk. If the Customer mapping in the AL Extension connector is wrong on Adobe Commerce, those orders may never sync. The Controller pings the BC Functional Consultant to fix the mapping; otherwise next month’s gap is even bigger.
  3. Sales Credit Memo Refunds ($118K) is policy, not error. This is the structural gap between gross commerce headlines and net GL booking. It will always exist; what matters is whether the rate is constant or rising. Rising = quality / fulfilment / pricing problem. Constant = baseline noise.
  4. The $12K Unknown bucket is the leakage signal. It is small enough not to alarm but it is where reconciliation problems live. The Controller hands this list to the BC Functional Consultant every Monday morning.
  5. Alert fires at >$10K unreconciled in the Unknown bucket. Released-Not-Invoiced and Sales Credit Memos are explained gaps; only Unknown trips the sentiment.

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Sibling cards merchants should reference together

This card is the trigger; the action lives on its companions.

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Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard

Where to look in Business Central: There is no single native BC report for this metric, that is precisely why Vortex IQ surfaces it. Power BI’s BC content pack also has no equivalent because Power BI does not connect to the commerce platforms (it could, with a custom data flow, but no out-of-the-box Microsoft tile does this). The closest manual approach inside BC is:
Run a Sales Order List view (Search > “Sales Orders”) with status filter Released, sum the Amount column. Then compare manually to the commerce platform’s last-30-day total revenue export.
A BC Functional Consultant can build this view as a saved configuration in 10 minutes. Most do not, because the cross-platform comparison requires pulling commerce data manually, and the moment you do that you have lost reproducibility. Vortex IQ runs this every 15 minutes via the OData v2.0 API. Adjacent BC reports that look related but are not:
  • Sales Statistics: shows all open SOs but without commerce-side comparison.
  • Customer Ledger Entries: AR-based, looks at unpaid Invoices not pre-Invoice gap.
  • Sales by Customer: groups posted revenue by Customer No., loses the per-order traceability.
  • Power BI Sales Insights tile: smooths the gap into a monthly trendline; does not include commerce data.
Why our number may legitimately differ from a manual reconciliation: Cross-connector reconciliation, the killer finding: This card IS the cross-connector reconciliation; it has no counterpart on the commerce platforms themselves. The closest sibling on the commerce side is the Pending vs Captured Revenue card on Stripe (which catches Stripe-routed payment captures awaiting settlement) but that compares Stripe-internal state, not commerce-to-ERP. The full audit trail with originating order IDs lives on Revenue Gap, Detailed Breakdown. That is the worklist; this card is the headline.

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Known limitations / merchant FAQs

Should this gap ever be zero? No, and you should be suspicious if it is. A small structural gap (Released-Not-Invoiced + Sales Credit Memos + period-boundary timing) is healthy. Zero gap means either the AL Extension connector is not pulling new commerce orders, or someone is force-posting the books before reconciliation. Aim for a stable gap that scales with revenue, with the Unknown bucket near zero. How big should the gap be vs total revenue? A typical mid-market commerce business on BC runs at 8 to 15% gross commerce vs net GL revenue gap inside a 30-day window:
  • Released-Not-Invoiced: 3 to 8% (higher for B2B Net-30, lower for DTC).
  • Sales Credit Memo Refunds: 4 to 10% (varies by category, apparel skews high; electronics low).
  • Voided / Cancelled: 1 to 3%.
  • Unknown: ideally < 0.5% of commerce gross.
If your gap is > 20%, something structural is wrong with the integration or accounting policy. Vortex IQ logs the breakdown so the cause is visible. What is the difference between this and the Detailed Breakdown card? This card is the headline ($X total gap, classified by reason). The detailed breakdown is the per-order list with commerce IDs, BC SO Numbers (or absent), and audit comments. The Controller checks this card; the BC Functional Consultant works the breakdown. Why is BigCommerce B2B always the biggest gap? B2B Net-30 introduces a structural ship-to-bill lag of 10 to 30 days. Orders ship from the warehouse (BC posts the Warehouse Shipment), but Sales Invoices generate on a billing schedule that can wait until the order is fully fulfilled or until a billing-cycle batch run (the BC Combine Shipments report). During that lag the order is real revenue economically but not yet GL revenue. DTC orders typically post Invoice at fulfilment (within 24 hours), so the lag is much smaller. Sales Credit Memo vs Refund: what is the BC-specific terminology? In Business Central a “refund” can mean two different things. A Sales Credit Memo reverses a posted Sales Invoice (or part of it), creating a negative G/L entry on revenue and a Customer Ledger Entry the customer can apply against the original Invoice or against a future Payment. A Refund in the Cash Receipt Journal is the actual money going out (bank account credit, customer balance debit). This card uses Sales Credit Memo posting (the revenue reversal), not the cash payout, because the question is “what hit the Income Statement”, not “what left the bank”. Does the card account for ASC 606 deferred revenue? BC’s standard chart treats invoiced revenue as recognised at posting. If your account uses a deferred-revenue extension (typically third-party AL apps like Continia or Insight Works), deferred revenue posts to a balance sheet account, not revenue, so it is correctly excluded from this card. Commerce gross still includes the full sale (it is a customer payment, not a recognition decision). The gap surfaces as Revenue Recognition Deferred in the breakdown if the AL Extension reports it, which is policy-correct, not a defect. Multi-currency stores: does the FX Translation bucket overstate? The bucket isolates the residual after period-average FX is applied. If your Companies transact in 5+ currencies, expect the FX bucket to be 0.5 to 2% of commerce gross. Anything larger usually means the field map’s FX rate source is misconfigured. What does the alert look like in practice? At >$10K Unknown, the Nerve Centre fires a sentiment alert and Ask Viq surfaces the question “What’s the £14K reconciliation drift this week?” with a deep-link to the breakdown card. The Controller typically resolves it in 15 to 30 minutes by mapping a missing Customer or escalating a stuck SO. Multi-Company vs single-Company tenants, does the card behave differently? Same logic, simpler scope. Single-Company tenants skip the FX Translation bucket and the elimination logic. Most fields are identical.

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Tracked live in Vortex IQ Nerve Centre

Revenue Gap vs Commerce is one of hundreds of KPI pulses Vortex IQ tracks across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and 70+ other ecommerce connectors. Nerve Centre runs the detection layer; Vortex Mind investigates the cause when something moves; Ask Viq lets you interrogate any number in plain English. Start for free or book a demo to see this metric running on your own data.