Understanding Margin Alerts

Overview

Margin alerts are a core feature of Profit Guardian. They notify you when changes in raw material costs cause a formula's realized profit margin to drop below your configured global floor. By acting on these alerts promptly, you can adjust pricing, swap raw materials, or renegotiate with suppliers before declining margins affect your bottom line. Margin alerts are available on the Pro tier and above.

How Margin Alerts Are Triggered

Whenever a raw material cost changes -- through a new purchase recording, a manual cost update, or a supplier price change -- Profit Guardian recalculates the total cost for every formula that uses that raw material. If the updated realized margin for a formula with linked sales drops by your configured threshold or falls below your default floor, the system generates an alert.

For example, if your shea butter cost increases by 15% and you have six formulas that use shea butter, Profit Guardian recalculates all six. Any linked-sale formula whose margin now falls below your floor receives an alert.

How Alerts Are Prioritized

Profit Guardian keeps the highest-impact margin alerts at the top of the list instead of relying on opaque scoring. In practice, higher-revenue formulas are prioritized more aggressively, and every alert shows:

• the formula affected
• previous margin and current margin
• the trigger rule that fired
• suggested recovery actions such as price adjustment or supplier review

Where Alerts Appear

Margin alerts are surfaced in three locations so you never miss an important change:

• Dashboard -- the Cost Alerts section on your main dashboard shows recent alerts with their priority and affected formula name.
• Profit Guardian page -- the full list of active alerts, at-risk formulas, recent cost changes, and suggested action items.
• Formula detail pages -- when viewing a specific formula, any active margin alerts for that formula appear at the top of the page.

Configuring Margin Thresholds

Global Threshold

1. Navigate to Settings.
2. Open Profit Guardian & Pricing.
3. Set your Margin Drop threshold in percentage points and your Default Target Margin percentage. This value applies to linked-sale formulas by default.

For example, if you set a global floor of 40%, any linked-sale formula whose realized margin drops below 40% will trigger an alert.

Email Notifications

You can receive email digests for margin alerts so you stay informed even when you are not logged in:

1. Go to Settings → Profit Guardian & Pricing.
2. In the Notifications section, enable Email Notifications.
3. Choose Daily Digest or Weekly Digest. If you choose weekly, pick the day you want it sent.

Email digests include the formula name, the previous margin, the current margin, and the raw material cost change that caused the alert. In-app alerts continue to appear on the dashboard as soon as the engine reevaluates.

Trend Analysis

Beyond individual alerts, Profit Guardian provides cost and margin context to help you see the bigger picture:

• Recent cost changes show which ingredients moved most over the last 30 days.
• Margin trends show how an affected formula is moving once linked sales are available.

Access this context from the Profit Guardian dashboard cards. If a formula does not have linked sales yet, you can still track cost history first and margin monitoring will begin once linked sales are recorded.

Responding to Alerts

When you receive a margin alert, consider these actions:

1. Review the cost change. Open the alert to see which raw material increased in cost and by how much.
2. Check the context. Is this a one-time spike or part of a broader drift? Use the recent cost changes and margin trend cards to decide.
3. Adjust your selling price. If the cost increase is permanent, raising your product price may be the simplest solution.
4. Explore raw material alternatives. Use the formula builder to test substitute raw materials that achieve similar results at lower cost.
5. Negotiate with your supplier. If you buy in volume, a bulk discount might offset the increase.
6. Link missing sales data. If a formula should be monitored but is not generating margin alerts, confirm the sales are linked to that formula and include sold quantity.

Tips

• Repeated alerts on the same ingredient are worth reviewing even if the first change looked manageable. Patterns usually matter more than one isolated update.
• Review your global margin floor at least once a quarter. As your business grows and your costs shift, the threshold that made sense six months ago may need updating.
• Turn on daily or weekly email digests if you want alerts outside the dashboard.