Read your Margin Briefing

Your Margin Briefing is every open alert MarginOS is currently holding for you, sorted into three groups by what it wants you to do about them: Today’s Top Moves (act now), Risk Radar (triage next) and Data Health (housekeeping). You read it on the Command Center, top to bottom, in that order.

What the Margin Briefing is

MarginOS does not hand you a list of generic best practices. Every card in your briefing is one specific finding about your own products, costs and orders — something it noticed while working through your data, with the evidence attached.

Every card is built the same way, so you can read one in about ten seconds:

• A title naming the finding, with a coloured dot for how serious it is.
• A small context line — for example Act now · Inventory or Data health · Cost data — telling you which group it belongs to and which part of the business it touches.
• What Happened — the finding itself.
• What this means — why it matters to your money.
• Recommended Action — what MarginOS suggests you do.
• A button that takes you to the screen where you can actually fix it, and (on most cards) a Mark resolved link.

The name “Margin Briefing” appears as the heading of the drawer that opens when you click View All on the Command Center. That drawer holds the complete list; the three sections on the page itself show you the most important few from each group.

Before you start

You need a connected store and at least one completed sync. Your briefing is generated from your own data, so a brand-new account has nothing to say until the first sync lands. Nothing to configure and no setting to switch on — briefings are on by default, and they refresh as your data syncs.

Everything below happens on the Command Center, the first item in the left-hand menu and the screen MarginOS opens on.

Read your briefing in five steps

1. Open the Command Center. The briefing sections sit below the performance and cash figures — the top of the page tells you how the business is doing, the bottom tells you what to do about it.
2. Clear Today’s Top Moves first. This is the act-now group: the handful of things worth your attention today, chosen by how much profit is at stake.
3. Work Risk Radar next. Margin, returns and trapped-cash problems to triage — real, but not today-or-never.
4. Leave Data Health for when you have a moment. These improve the accuracy of your numbers rather than your profit. The section only appears when there is something in it.
5. Click View All to see everything. The number on the button is your total open count, and the drawer that opens — headed Margin Briefing — lists every card rather than the top few.

The three groups

Group	On the card	What lands here	When to deal with it
Today’s Top Moves	Act now	Products losing money on every order, ad spend going to something unprofitable, a best-seller about to run out, a price you can defensibly raise.	Today. This is the list you clear first.
Risk Radar	Risk	Margin slipping, returns climbing, cash sitting in stock that is not moving, a product that has quietly stopped selling.	This week. Triage, not emergency.
Data Health	Data health	A product with no cost on file, a figure running on an assumption instead of a real number, a feed that has stopped refreshing.	When you have a moment — but the sooner you do, the more your profit figures are worth.

The section headings and the labels on the cards are worded slightly differently — Today’s Top Moves against Act now, Data Health against Data health. They are the same three groups.

How MarginOS decides which group a card belongs to

By what the alert is, not by how alarming it sounds. That distinction is deliberate, and it is the part most alert systems get wrong.

A severity score alone puts the loudest thing at the top, which is rarely the most useful thing. Stock sitting dead on a shelf is genuinely serious — and it is also not something you fix this morning, so it belongs in Risk Radar rather than at the top of your day. A note saying one product’s cost is an assumption rather than a measured figure is quiet and unglamorous, and it stays in Data Health where it will not crowd out a decision. MarginOS routes each kind of finding to a fixed group so the order on your screen reflects what you should do, not how loudly it was written.

Two rules apply inside each group. MarginOS shows a handful of cards per group rather than all of them, and picks which ones by how much profit is at stake. And when the same problem affects several products at once, they collapse into a single card that stands in for all of them, which always shows first — one card reading “several products have no cost on file” is more useful than a screenful of near-identical ones.

The routing is shared, not duplicated. Catalog Profit’s Briefings tab shows the product-level subset of the same briefing, using the same three groups as filter buttons, so a card never changes group when you change screens.

Example

You open MarginOS on a Monday. Today’s Top Moves has three cards: a bundle that is now selling below cost after a supplier price rise, a product your ads are still spending on that has not been profitable for a month, and your best-selling SKU heading for a stockout. You click the first, land on that product with the cost breakdown already open, and fix the price.

Risk Radar has two: returns creeping up on one line, and cash tied up in a product that has barely moved since spring. You note both and move on.

Data Health has one card covering several products with no cost on file. You click it, land on the filtered list, and add the missing costs — and the next time your data syncs, the profit figures above start telling the truth about those products.

Common questions

I marked a card resolved and it came back. Why?

Because the underlying condition is still true. Mark resolved clears the card from your list; it does not change the thing the card is about. If the situation still holds at the next sync, MarginOS raises it again — which is the honest behaviour, since the alternative is a clean-looking briefing hiding a real problem. Fix the cause and it stops coming back on its own.

Why does one card cover several products?

When enough products trip the same alert, MarginOS collapses them into a single card so one issue does not bury everything else. Those combined cards have no Mark resolved button — there is no single thing to resolve — and clicking one takes you to the full list of products behind it.

Does Catalog Profit show the same briefings?

It shows the part of them that is about your products. Catalog Profit’s Briefings tab is the product-level subset of your Margin Briefing — the same cards, the same wording, the same three groups — with the buttons re-pointed so acting on a card filters the table in front of you instead of navigating away. Alerts about your account or a connection have no product to filter to, so they stay on the Command Center.

My briefing is empty. Is that right?

If your data is connected and syncing, yes — an empty section reads “No active signals needing attention. You are all caught up!” and means exactly that. Worth a sanity check, though: if you have just connected your store, the first sync may not have finished, and a catalogue with no costs loaded gives MarginOS less to find than you would expect.

A card looks serious but it is in Risk Radar, not Top Moves. Is that a mistake?

No. Top Moves is about what is worth doing today, not about what is most alarming. Cash trapped in dead stock can be the largest number on your screen and still be a this-week problem rather than a this-morning one. The grouping answers “what do I do about this”, and that is the more useful question.

Related

• Read the Command Center — the screen your briefing lives on, and everything above it.
• Read Catalog Profit — where the product-level briefings are, and where most cards send you.
• Data Trust — how much of your catalogue runs on evidence rather than assumption.
• Costs MarginOS could not match — the most common thing behind a Data Health card.
• Why MarginOS shows N/A instead of zero — the principle behind the Data Health group.