Setting Up Alpha Insights
Adding your license
The first thing you will need to do is add your license, if you don’t have an active license on Alpha Insights you will not be able to use it.
As previously mentioned, you will be able to find your license key on the order success page, your order success email & you will also be able to find it in your account area at any time.
Alpha Insights pages are all handled by their own menu item in the WordPress admin menu.
If you click on Alpha Insights on the menu, you will be redirected to the licensing page.
You must enter your license on this page and click save.
Once you save your license, Alpha Insights will perform a check verifying that this license is inactive and valid, it will then activate your license and you will be good to go.
If you have any issues with activating your license in Alpha Insights and you are sure you have an active license, open a ticket from within your account area to get premium support. You are otherwise welcome to reach out to us anyway you see fit.
Settings
General Settings
There are a few settings that are worth quickly checking before you get going.
General Settings – Default Prices
In here you will be able to set default cost prices, this is fairly important as it will set your fallback cost prices in calculations if you haven’t entered any cost prices on your products.
General Settings – Report Settings
This will set the order status’ which we will be assessing as “paid”.
This is important if you have made any custom order status’ so that they will be included in your calculation.
General Settings – Appearance Settings
Here we’ve added a CSS library which will give your WP Admin a bit of a modern look, this is not compulsary so you can set this accordingly.
We also have an option to prevent admin notices,
Currency Settings
This is where we handle currency conversions.
We’ve begun with some default conversion rates, this enables us to convert currencies if your expenses are paid in another currency for example, and convert them into your store currency.
We’ve also added support for converting multi-currency orders into your store’s native currency & you also have the ability to set different currencies in your cost of goods (although we don’t recommend having multiple currency costs).
The way this works is if you get an order which has been paid for in a currency other than your store’s currency, we will convert those figure’s into your store’s currency so that you can get accurate profit reports, all within your own currency.
Exchange rate API
This is highly recommended to get, you can create a free account with Open Exchange Rates which will allow you to automatically retrieve exchange rates.
Once this is filled in, we will fetch exchange rates daily on your behalf.
You can otherwise manually enter some conversion rates (against the USD) if you would like.
Importing / Bulk Updating Cost Of Goods
How to import Cost Of Goods from another plugin
We’ve set it up so that you can easily import cost of goods from another plugin within 60 seconds.
If you go to the “load data from another meta key” option within Alpha Insights > Settings > Import Bulk Update COGS, you will see a dropdown.
With this dropdown, you must select the meta key where your cost of goods were previously stored.
You can do a bit of trial and error here, nothing is saved immediately.
If you select a cost of goods meta key and then press “load meta key data” this will load up all of your products with the values set in your other plugin.
These values are not immediately saved, so you can review the results in your table.
Once you are happy, click on Save Table Data.
Bulk Updating Cost Of Goods
We will automatically load up a full table of your products for your to edit.
This is fairly straightforward, simply edit the input box on the right of the product and click Save Table Data once you are happy.
If this page is struggling to load
If this page is struggling to load, it may be that you have a very large number of products.
We’ve tested Alpha Insights with over 10,000 products before which has loaded fine, but if you have a large number of products and low server performance it’s likely this could cause issues.
If this is the case you may need to find a dedicated importing plugin to handle bulk imports.
Email Settings
Appearance Settings
You can choose to include or exlucde the header and footer we provide with our emails.
You would want to do this if you are using some sort of HTML email template so that it doesn’t double up on headers.
Emails
You have the choice to send a number of emails on schedule.
This is fairly self explanatory, you can choose to send a profit report, expense report & inventory report daily, weekly & monthly.
You can select what fields you would like to include in the emails, whether you would like to include attachments and who these emails should go to.
These emails are triggered to send somewhere between 8am and 9am according to the timezone set in your WP Admin General Settings.
