Automated document extraction
MarginChief reads shipment documents and pulls out the data itself. Upload purchase orders, commercial invoices and freight, duty or brokerage bills as PDFs, and the extraction engine identifies line items, quantities, unit prices, currencies and surcharges without manual entry. It finds the charges that hide in the places people miss, like a fuel surcharge on the third page of a forwarder's invoice. Extraction supports PDFs up to five pages.
Three-way matching
Three-way matching reconciles what you ordered, what you were invoiced, and what you were charged to ship it. MarginChief compares the purchase order against the commercial invoice against the freight and duty bills, and surfaces quantities that do not reconcile, prices that moved between order and invoice, and charges appearing on one document but not another. In a spreadsheet a discrepancy just becomes a number. Here it becomes a flag.
Freight and duty allocation
Allocation is how a single shared bill becomes a cost per SKU. MarginChief distributes freight, brokerage, insurance and handling across every product in a shipment using a basis you select: by weight, by value or by volume. Line-specific charges such as duty assessed per HS code attach directly to the SKU that incurred them. The basis is a costing decision with real consequences, so you choose it explicitly rather than inheriting whatever formula the last person wrote.
Human review and approval
Automation does not post to your ledger unsupervised. MarginChief presents each completed calculation for review, so a person confirms the unit cost before it is treated as final. This matters because the figure flows into inventory valuation, COGS and every margin report built on them. Your team keeps the last word.
Audit trail
Every component of a unit cost keeps a link back to where it came from: the source document, the line on that document, the allocation basis applied, and who approved the result. When an accountant, auditor or acquirer asks why a SKU is valued the way it is, the answer is retrievable rather than reconstructed from memory and an old spreadsheet.
SKU cost history
MarginChief retains unit cost for every SKU across every shipment, with no retention limit on any plan. Because freight rates move, duties change and suppliers adjust, a single snapshot tells you very little. Seeing the trend shipment by shipment lets you catch cost creep while there is still time to reprice or renegotiate, rather than discovering it at year end.
Multi-currency costing
Supplier invoiced in one currency, forwarder in another, books kept in a third is the normal case for an importer. MarginChief handles multiple currencies within a single shipment and reports unit cost in your reporting currency.
Shopify sync
MarginChief connects to Shopify and pulls product and order data in automatically, so you are not re-keying your catalogue to start a calculation. The sync runs one way: MarginChief reads from Shopify and does not write costs back. Every plan includes one connected store; Enterprise supports multiple.
CSV export
Finished unit costs export as CSV on every plan, ready to import into QuickBooks Online, Xero or your inventory system.
See it on a real shipment
Start a free trial, or read how a calculation moves from documents to an approved unit cost.