Profit Compass · Built In-House at Human
Profit Compass is the profit intelligence software behind every account we run — your real contribution margin, built from your actual orders, product costs, and ad spend, synced throughout the day. And it's more than a dashboard: it's the North Star every Human on your team works toward.
Included at no additional charge in every active engagement.
Our North Star
Speaking your language is just the start. Profit Compass makes sure your whole team at Human — not just the media buyers — sees the work the way you see your business. It's the same North Star we define together in the Human Method, made visible to everyone, every day.
One Number, Every Discipline
Everyone on your account works from your live business data. A developer proposes an upsell widget because a dollar of AOV is worth a specific amount to your bottom line. An SEO prioritizes the pages that drive profitable revenue, not just traffic. That's only possible when the whole team can see the number.
Every Conversation
Weekly reports, monthly reviews, roadmap meetings — they open with your contribution margin, new customers, and revenue, and they close with what we're doing to move them. Progress means those numbers growing, not a task list getting checked off.
Every Decision
Time and budget are always limited. So the question is never "what could we do?" — it's "what's most likely to grow your profit, fastest, with the resources we have?" If an idea can't answer that, it doesn't make the roadmap. Even when it was our idea.
Why We Built It
Not because anyone's hiding it. Because day to day, it genuinely isn't visible:
Return on ad spend measures whether ads drove revenue — not whether that revenue made money after product costs, fees, and shipping. You can hit a ROAS target and still shrink your profit. It's a useful signal, but it was never the answer.
The honest answer lives in your accounting — which closes days or weeks after the month ends. By the time you know whether a month was profitable, it's already history, and the moment to act on it is gone.
What It Computes
One scorecard where revenue, COGS, ad spend, and profit finally agree. Profit Compass pulls your orders, ad platforms, and analytics into one model and computes true contribution margin — the profit your marketing actually generates — down to the day, with the details that make the number real: COGS at the SKU level, discounts and refunds netted out, shipping revenue counted in, postage and merchant fees counted against, subscription and one-time revenue split apart.
Meta, Google, Bing, Shopify, BigCommerce, and GA4 — reconciled into one number your CFO would recognize, synced throughout the day.
Alongside it: sessions, conversion rate, AOV, new vs. returning customers, CAC, break-even CAC, LTV, and marketing efficiency — every lever that rolls up to the number above.
Inside Profit Compass
These aren't reporting views. They're the working tools our team uses every day to make strategic decisions on your account — and you get the same access we do. Any question about your business, answered without waiting on anyone.
The state of your business in one screen: contribution margin, new customers, and revenue with a health status, diagnostic signals, and recommended actions. This opens every review we run together.
Your full financial picture month by month, years deep — gross revenue to contribution margin to EBITDA. It's where our strategists spend their time, and where you can look up any number from any month without asking. One table your finance team and your marketing team can finally read together.
Every day scored against your goals — spend, revenue, CAC, and contribution margin, blended and by channel. This is how we decide to push, hold, or pull back on your ads, every single day. Goal bands flag when efficiency drifts off target in either direction.
Yes, either direction — a ROAS that's too high usually means untapped growth. We'll flag that too.
We run your month against plan every day — live pacing, projected landing spend, planned-vs-actual channel split. So a soft month is a call we make on the 8th, not a surprise you get on the 30th.
Your promotional calendar — promos, email sends, launches, site changes — mapped directly against revenue and contribution margin. It's how we plan what's coming and understand what happened: "Why did Tuesday spike?" always has an answer. And every event becomes a data point, so over time we don't just explain revenue. We start predicting it.
Profit Compass watches your account around the clock and flags what a human might miss: spend spiking beyond plan, spend dropping to zero from a billing failure, efficiency drifting off goal. It once caught a compromised ad account within a day of the fraudulent spend starting.
ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot are becoming a real acquisition channel. We track the sessions and revenue they drive — an emerging channel most brands can't see yet, measured right next to everything else.
New vs. returning revenue, repeat rates, CAC against break-even, and LTV by monthly cohort. This is how we know what a new customer is really worth to you — and set acquisition budgets you can actually afford, before a campaign ever launches.
Part of the Partnership
Great software exists off the shelf, and your platform reports aren't wrong — some of our partners run both alongside us. What you can't buy off the shelf is a full team — paid media, SEO, design, dev, CRO — making their daily decisions inside your margin data. Profit Compass was built in-house for exactly that: your measurement and the people acting on it live in the same place, so nothing gets lost between the report and the work.
Where Every Partnership Starts
Every new partnership at Human opens with a Profit Compass audit: your revenue, your margin, your customer economics — assembled from your own data and walked through together, honestly. If the numbers say your current strategy is working, we'll tell you that too.
FAQ
Yes — full access, from day one. Your team logs into the same system ours works in. Many of our partners check it daily; some CFOs live in it.
No. Profit Compass isn't an upsell — it's how we work. It's included at no additional charge in every active engagement, because we can't do our job to our standard without it.
Tools like Triple Whale are genuinely useful, and some of our partners run them alongside us. The difference is that Profit Compass is built around how we operate and connected to the team acting on it daily — it's less a product than the way we run your account.
Profit Compass isn't designed to match your accounting to the cent — your books are still the system of record. It's designed to be directionally right, every single day, and that's where the power is: knowing this morning that yesterday was profitable, that this month is pacing behind last year, or that a promo actually made money. We keep it honest by modeling COGS at the SKU level where your store supports it, netting out discounts and refunds, including merchant fees and shipping, and periodically reconciling against your P&L. Even if the number is off by a little, the direction it points is incredibly powerful — and it's available five weeks before your books are.
Bring your data to the first call, and we'll show you what it says.
