Noon Unsettled Orders: Why Your Dashboard and Your Bank Never Agree

Every Noon seller eventually has the same argument with themselves. The dashboard says a good month. The bank says otherwise. Both are right, and the thing standing between them is a category of money most sellers never measure on purpose: Noon unsettled orders, the sales that have happened but have not yet been through a statement. On a store that sells steadily, that is roughly two to three weeks of revenue, permanently in transit. This post explains where it comes from, what it is worth while it is in transit, and how to put a number on yours.

The order row: recognised the day it is placed

Noon's transaction view records an order the moment a customer places it. Noon's own help centre defines the "Order" transaction type as the row that appears when the customer places the order and it shows in the transaction view for the first time; later rows for the same order number are "Order Update". The Order row carries Net Proceeds, which Noon defines as revenue from product sales before fees.

So from day one the sale exists in your data, with a revenue figure. What it often does not carry yet is the full set of fees. Commission, the fulfilment charge and any shipping credit can arrive on Order Update rows days later, and the refund, if there is one, weeks later. A dashboard that reads the export faithfully will show the sale immediately and the costs as they land. That is correct behaviour, and it is the first reason the number moves after you have looked at it.

The statement: paid when delivered, weeks later

Payment runs on a different clock. Noon's Payments processing policy says statements are generated every Wednesday and include orders delivered during the statement period, not orders placed. It also says the payout for a Wednesday statement is processed on the Thursday of the following week for the UAE and Saudi Arabia, and the Tuesday of the following week for Egypt, then takes one to two business days to land. When does Noon pay sellers has the full calendar and the thresholds.

Put the two clocks together. An order placed on a Monday, delivered Thursday, enters the following Wednesday's statement, is paid the Thursday after that, and reaches the bank a day or two later. Seventeen to twenty-one days in a smooth week. The order was "revenue" on Monday and "cash" three weeks later, and in between it was unsettled.

The estimate: what an unsettled order is worth today

Here is where tools diverge, and where you should be picky. An unsettled order has a known revenue (Net Proceeds on its Order row) and unknown or partial fees. There are three ways to value it:

1. Revenue only, fees zero. Wrong in the flattering direction. Every unsettled order looks like a hundred percent margin until the statement arrives and takes its cut, and the month's profit drops after the fact.
2. Revenue minus a typed fee rate. Better, but only as good as the typed rate, and typed rates go stale when Noon changes a weight band or a promotion ends.
3. Revenue minus the fees that SKU actually paid last time. The statement history for the same SKU over the last few months gives an effective commission rate and a fulfilment charge per unit. Apply those and label the result as an estimate until the real rows land.

The third is what SKUmargin does, and the label matters as much as the number. An estimate that is presented as fact is how a dashboard loses trust. The dashboard should say, in words, how many orders and how much value is still estimated and where the estimate came from, so when the statement corrects it nobody is surprised.

One more subtlety: the price. A seller who reprices a SKU on Tuesday should not see Monday's unsettled units revalued. The unsettled order is worth what the customer paid, which is the price that was listed on the day it was placed, not today's price. Valuing at the current listing price is a common shortcut and it is wrong every time the price moves.

How to measure your own unsettled balance

You can do this in a spreadsheet in ten minutes, and it is worth doing once even if you then let a tool do it.

1. In Seller Lab, Payment and Fees, then Statements: note the date and period of your most recent statement.
2. Payment and Fees, then Transaction View: set the range from the day after that period ended to today, download the export.
3. Keep rows with an order number. Rows marked "NA" are account-level charges, not orders.
4. Sum Net Proceeds. That is the gross value Noon has recognised and not yet paid.
5. Sum the fee columns that are present (Referral Fee, Fulfillment and Logistic Fee, Other Order Fee, less Shipping Credits and Order Subsidies). Where an order shows revenue and no fees yet, estimate them from what the same SKU paid in the previous export; do not treat the blank as zero.
6. Subtract. The result is the cash you can expect from those orders, less any refunds that arrive before the statement. Write it down with the date; next week's number should be similar in size and made of different orders.

If the number is growing week on week without sales growing, orders are not being delivered, and that is a fulfilment problem before it is a finance one. If it shrinks suddenly, a statement landed. If it never changes, you are reading the wrong date range.

How to read your Noon settlement report, fee by fee has the column-by-column version of the export, including what a refund row and an advertising row look like, both of which will turn up in the same file.

Reading the note on your dashboard

Whatever tool you use, the unsettled figure should be visible as a sentence, not buried in a tooltip. The sentence you want reads something like: eleven orders worth this much are not yet in a statement, valued at the price listed when each was placed, with fees estimated from this SKU's settled history. Each clause answers a question you would otherwise ask. How many. How much. Valued how. Fees from where.

When the statement arrives, the sentence should change, not disappear: nine of those orders are now settled at their real fees, two remain estimated. If it simply vanishes you cannot tell whether the statement covered everything or the tool stopped counting. And when the estimate and the real figure differ materially, that is information: the SKU's effective commission or fulfilment charge has moved, and the next unsettled orders will be estimated from the new figure.

Three things that make the gap bigger

Returns. A return received this week for an item paid three weeks ago is deducted from this week's statement. The reversal lands in a different period from the sale, so a month with normal sales and a spike in returns from the previous month looks worse than it was, and the month before looks better than it was.

Account-level charges. Advertising fees, storage subsidies and similar items arrive as Statement Fee rows with no order. They move the statement total, and therefore the payout, without touching any order's numbers. A seller who reconciles order by order and cannot find the missing money is usually looking at one of these.

Thresholds and holidays. Noon holds a payout below the minimum for your account type and rolls it forward, and a public holiday extends the transfer window. Neither changes what you earned; both change when the bank sees it.

Where SKUmargin fits

SKUmargin reads the transaction view automatically every two hours and keeps the two clocks apart on purpose. Settled orders carry the exact fees Noon charged. Unsettled orders are valued at the price listed on the day they were placed, with fees estimated from that SKU's own settlement history, and the dashboard says in words how many orders and how much value is still an estimate and where the estimate came from. When the statement arrives it overwrites the estimate; nothing is counted twice, and the header note changes from "estimated" to "from your settled orders". The live demo shows the note on a sample store, and the free trial takes your first export the moment you upload it.

The gap between the dashboard and the bank does not go away. It becomes a number you know, that you can watch, and that stops being a surprise on payout day.