Revenue at Risk (live) for the selected period.
At a glance
A live dollar figure for the revenue currently exposed to loss, the value of orders that could fail, cancel, or refund because of an operational problem right now. It rolls up the money sitting behind open orders that cannot be fulfilled, items at oversell risk, and orders held by payment or stock issues. Where the other operational cards count problems, this one prices them, so an owner or finance lead can see, in money, what is at stake before it becomes an actual loss.
| What it counts | The summed total_money value of orders and exposure currently flagged as at risk: open orders blocked from fulfilment, orders for items projected to go negative on hand, and orders held by payment or stock problems. It is a live exposure figure, not a realised loss. |
| Channel / source treatment | All channels combined. Exposure can come from Square Online web orders, Square POS, or Square Invoices. The split by source.name tells you which channel the risk sits in, usually web fulfilment. |
| Currency / unit | Currency (the value is summed in each location’s currency; use the per-location filter for a clean multi-currency read). |
| Time window | RT (real-time, recomputed continuously from the Square Orders and Inventory APIs) |
| Alert trigger | Fires whenever the at-risk value rises above zero. Because this card prices real exposure, any non-zero figure is something to look at; the size tells you how urgently. |
| Roles | owner, finance |
| At risk vs lost | This is exposure, not a realised loss. Revenue at risk that you resolve in time never becomes a refund or cancellation. The point is to act before it converts. |
| What feeds it | Open-order backlog, oversell projection, payment holds, and stock-outs blocking dispatch. The operational cards diagnose each; this one totals the money. |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Square Online data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
A US apparel merchant on Square. One flagship store plus a Square Online storefront shipping nationwide. The card is read at 09:00 on 14 Mar 26. A popular jacket has drifted into oversell, and a payment-processor blip has left a cluster of web orders unconfirmed.| Risk source | Orders affected | Value at risk | Channel |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oversold jacket (negative on-hand projected) | 22 | $3,740 | Square Online Store |
| Web orders held by payment confirmation | 14 | $1,260 | Square Online Store |
| Open orders blocked by an out-of-stock add-on | 6 | $410 | Square Online Store |
| Revenue at Risk (this card) | 42 | $5,410 |
- The alert fires because the figure is above zero. $5,410 is exposure, not yet a loss. Everything on this list can still be saved: restocking or capping the jacket, reprocessing the held payments, sourcing the add-on. The card exists to prompt that action while the orders are still recoverable.
- The biggest line is the oversell, and it has an upstream cause. The $3,740 jacket exposure traces straight back to Oversell Risk and the drift that caused it. Pricing the risk here tells you which problem to fix first, the oversell, not the smaller payment hold.
- It is live, so it falls as you fix things. Unlike a period metric, this figure drops the moment you resolve a cause: reprocess the payments and $1,260 comes off immediately. Watching it tick down is the fastest confirmation that an incident is under control.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Revenue at Risk (live) |
|---|---|
| Oversell Risk (negative on-hand projected) | The most common driver. Oversold items put real orders at risk; this card prices that exposure in money. |
| Open Orders | The order queue behind much of the exposure. A backlog that cannot be fulfilled is at-risk value waiting to convert to loss. |
| Canceled Orders (24h) | The realised version. Risk that you fail to resolve in time becomes a cancellation; watch both to see how much exposure converts. |
| Refund Rate | The money that actually leaked. At-risk value that turns into refunds shows up here, so the two together show exposure versus realised loss. |
| POS to Online Inventory Drift Alert | A frequent root cause of oversell, which is a frequent root cause of at-risk revenue. Fixing drift upstream lowers this figure. |
| Out-of-Stock Products | Stock-outs blocking dispatch are a direct contributor. A spike here often precedes a rise in revenue at risk. |
Reconciling against Square
Where to look in the Square Dashboard: There is no single Square Dashboard tile that reports revenue at risk, it is a Vortex IQ composite that prices several live signals together. To reconcile it, check the underlying pieces in Square: Items & Orders, Orders filtered to open and unconfirmed states for the order values, and Inventory for the items projected to go negative. Summing the value of those at-risk orders by hand should approximate this card. Other Square Dashboard views that relate but are not the same:- Orders, filtered to open / unconfirmed: the order values that feed the exposure. Summing these approximates the figure.
- Inventory, low stock and out of stock: the stock signals behind oversell exposure, but not a revenue figure.
- Reports, Refunds: realised losses, the outcome of unresolved risk, not the live exposure itself.
- Reports, Sales summary: completed revenue, the opposite of at-risk, money already safely earned.
| Reason | Direction of divergence |
|---|---|
| Composite definition. This card combines oversell projection, open-order backlog, and payment holds. Square has no equivalent single figure, so a hand reconciliation depends on which signals you include. | Differs by how you scope the manual sum |
| Live recomputation. The value changes continuously as orders resolve. A dashboard snapshot taken a few minutes apart will read differently. | Moves between snapshots |
| Multi-currency. Exposure is summed across locations; for a multi-currency merchant the figure mixes currencies unless filtered. | Material for cross-border merchants |
| Projection vs actual. Oversell exposure is projected from on-hand and demand trends, so it estimates risk rather than counting a settled fact. | Projection-driven differences |
| Card | Expected relationship | What causes legitimate divergence |
|---|---|---|
| Refund Rate | At-risk value that is not resolved converts to refunds | Well-managed risk never becomes a refund, so a high at-risk figure with a low refund rate means you are catching exposure in time. A rising refund rate after a risk spike means it converted. |
stripe.failed-payments | Usually unrelated for Square merchants | Square processes its own payments, so payment-hold exposure shows in Square, not Stripe. Stripe is typically zero unless a separate non-Square billing tool is in play. Treat Square as the source of truth. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Is revenue at risk money I have already lost? No. It is exposure, the value of orders that could still fail, cancel, or refund if you do nothing. Resolve the cause in time and that value is never lost. The card is an early-warning price tag, not a record of loss. For realised loss, watch Refund Rate and Canceled Orders (24h). Why did the alert fire on a small figure? Because the trigger is any value above zero. Even a small at-risk figure represents real orders you can still save, so the card surfaces it. The size tells you how urgent it is: a few hundred dollars is a quick fix, several thousand warrants immediate attention. What goes into the figure? The value of open orders blocked from fulfilment, orders for items projected to go negative on hand (oversell), and orders held by payment or stock problems. Each underlying problem has its own diagnostic card; this one totals the money so you can prioritise by value, not just by count. How do I bring it down? Fix the largest underlying cause first. Open the card alongside Oversell Risk and Open Orders to find which line dominates the exposure, then act on that, restock or cap an oversold item, reprocess held payments, source a blocked add-on. The figure falls live as each cause clears. Why does the number keep changing? Because it is recomputed continuously. Orders resolve, payments confirm, and stock moves throughout the day, so the live figure rises and falls in real time. That is the point: you can watch it drop as you work through an incident. For a stable historical view, the realised outcome lives on the refund and cancellation cards. Does this include POS as well as web? Yes, all channels. In practice most at-risk value sits on the web channel, because POS sales close instantly at the till and rarely linger in a risky state. But an unpaid invoice or a stock-blocked in-store order can contribute too. Filter bysource.name to see the channel breakdown.
Can I change the alert threshold?
The default fires above zero, because any genuine exposure is worth seeing. A high-volume merchant who always carries some baseline exposure may prefer a value floor so only material risk alerts. The per-merchant threshold can be set in your Vortex IQ workspace.