Configure for accuracy
As you poke around Mantle and get familiar with your metrics, you might notice some numbers aren’t quite what you expected. Don’t worry – this is pretty common, and there are a few reasons why.
Sometimes it’s because you’re seeing your true numbers for the first time, or coming from platforms that don’t quite get Shopify’s quirks. For example, a common misconception is treating the Earnings report in your Partner Dashboard like it’s Monthly Recurring Revenue – they look similar, but they tell different stories.
Other times it might be how your plans are designed, especially if you’re using usage charges to emulate subscriptions or offering “free” plans. If this sounds familiar, give us a shout – we love solving these puzzles and can help clean things up.
But most often, it comes down to three key areas where the Partner API needs a little help: trials, discounts, and plan cadence. Getting these right is crucial because even basic metrics like MRR depend on knowing if a subscription is active or in trial, if it’s full price or discounted, and if it’s billed annually or monthly.
Plan cadence
The Partner API doesn’t explicitly tell us if plans are monthly or annual. This can get especially fuzzy with annual plans that haven’t processed their first charge yet, leading to potential misclassification in your metrics.
To straighten this out:
- Navigate to your plans settings
- Review the cadence applied to each plan
- If you spot any inaccuracies, edit the plan
- Set the correct billing interval:

- Save your changes
Trials
The Partner API keeps us guessing about:
- Who’s currently on a trial
- How much trial time remains
- Which plans include trials
- Trial duration per plan
- Whether trials start on install or subscription
We’ve got some clever detection methods and reverse engineering to figure this out, but nothing beats proper configuration:
Global trial settings
To configure your app’s default trial behavior:
- Go to your App settings (Your app -> Settings)
- Look for the Trial Configuration section
- Set when trials start – on install or subscription activation:

- Define your default trial duration that applies to most plans
- Save your changes
Remember to repeat this process for each app you have on the App Store – each one might handle trials differently!
Plan-specific settings
For plans that don’t follow your global trial rules:
- Navigate to the plans section of your app
- Find the plan you need to customize
- Click edit on that plan
- Adjust the trial length:

- Save your changes
- Repeat for any other plans that need custom trial settings
Discounts
Another Partner API blind spot – we can’t directly see:
- Who has active discounts
- How much each discount is worth
- How long discounts have been active
- When discounts are set to expire
Apply discount for reporting
When you need to mark a customer’s discount for accurate reporting:
- Create a discount code in Mantle. While discounts are typically used with Mantle Billing, they can be used for reporting purposes.
- Navigate to the customer’s detail page in Mantle
- Look for ‘Actions’ in the customer profile
- Click ‘Manage Reporting’ under the Actions menu
- Find the discount configuration section:

- Enter the discount amount for their active subscription
- Save your changes
Remember: If you’re not integrated with Mantle, these settings only affect reporting, not your actual customers.
Getting to perfect accuracy
If you worked through the recommendations above but don’t see the changes reflected in your reporting, send us a message. We may need to resync your new settings for changes to take effect.
Beyond that there are plenty of complex cases. Trial and discount data gets trickier when you’re dealing with:
- Extended trials
- Plan changes with new trials
- Custom trial scenarios
- Expiring discounts
- Newly introduced discounts
If you want your trial and discount data to be spot-on automagically, the poorly kept secret is a super lightweight integration with Mantle. When integrated, we can pull trial data directly from each shop’s Admin API, including:
- Exact trial days remaining
- Current trial status
- Trial history
- Discounts applied to subscriptions
- Discount amounts
- Discount expiry
To learn more about integrating, check out the docs. There are even more reasons to integrate, and the path to integration is easy to get started and simple to complete.