Saras iQ 24 Questions

24 Questions To Ask Before You Commit Your Q4 Budget

The prompts 8- and 9-figure operators run to pressure-test a Q4 plan — cohort payback, discount depth, marginal CAC, true contribution margin.

24 copy-paste prompts across 5 planning categories
The exact query set to run on January 5th to grade your own plan
Free. Instant. No call required.

Send Me The 24 Prompts

$1,999/month · Live in 10 days · No data engineers needed

Send Me The 24 Prompts

$1,999/month · Live in 10 days · No data engineers needed

THE PROBLEM

Most Q4 plans are built on a number nobody can defend

01

Five systems. Five revenue numbers. No referee.

Shopify counts an order when it's placed. Every ad platform counts the conversion it can claim — and they all claim it. Add them up and you can reach 200% of your actual Shopify revenue.

"Dashboard says we did $84K last week. Shopify says $71K."

02

So the spreadsheet becomes the reporting system.

Built by one person, audited by nobody, a week stale by the time anyone opens it. And that person takes a week off in December.

"It takes me half a day in Excel every week to figure out which campaigns are really making money."

03

And the AI answers anyway.

It won't say it can't reach your data. It returns a complete analysis with revenue pulled from nowhere. Ask twice in two fresh chats and most brands get two different numbers.

"Every answer is a confident guess dressed in SQL."

Q4 is when a five-point margin error stops being an annoyance. These 24 prompts are how you find it in September instead of February.

What's Inside

What's in the guide

24 prompts, 5 categories.

CATEGORY
PROMPTS
WHAT IT SETTLES
Look Back
4
Decompose last Q4 into first-order, rebill and returning-customer revenue — and quantify the variance when the three don't sum to total
Customer Base Review
6
The discount band where 12-month revenue per customer falls below what you paid to acquire them. Plus: how many of last Q4's "new customers" had already cancelled on you once
Offer Mechanics
6
Entry products that rank high on volume and low on 12-month value, weeks of inventory cover by SKU, and the forgone revenue hiding behind every stockout
Performance Targets
4
The spend level where marginal CAC passes average CAC — and projected CAC at 1.5× and 2× current weekly spend
Forecasting
4
Base, stretch and conservative targets with the assumption set written down, plus the exact query set to run on January 5th to grade this plan pass/fail

Send Me The 24 Prompts

$1,999/month · Live in 10 days · No data engineers needed

Those are the prompts where a spreadsheet, a dashboard, or a raw AI on your data will hand back an answer that is confident and wrong — a mis-joined table, a double-counted discount, a reactivation counted as a new customer.

WHO IT'S FOR

Built for the brands in between

This is for you if:

You're doing $10M+ on Shopify
You've bought a reporting tool and still do manual checks on it
Someone on your team maintains the spreadsheet that the real decisions come from
You want contribution margin by channel without a two-week detour
You sell on subscription and your churn and LTV live nowhere near your COGS and ad spend

This isn't for you if:

You're under $5M — the reconciliation problem hasn't cost you money yet
You already have a data team, a warehouse and a governed semantic layer
You're happy taking the platform's word for it
WHY SARAS

Who's behind the guide

Saras Analytics builds the data layer for Shopify brands. Saras iQ is the part you talk to: ask a business question in plain English and get the answer, the chart, and the SQL that produced it — in chat, in Slack, or inside Claude through iQ MCP, if that's where your team already works.

±1% certified

Every metric reconciled against the source system. Not modelled and hoped

500+ daily QA checks

Your numbers get checked hundreds of times a day, not once a week by a human who's guessing

Traceable SQL

The query behind every answer is visible. No black box

Live in under 10 days

Not a four-to-six week onboarding

"5–6 days… now take under 2 hours."

Sean Frank, CEO, Ridge

"I just log into Claude with iQ."

Jenna Habayeb, President

"I just get answers where I am."

Jason Panzer, President
90 minutes → 30 seconds
For Cross-market Product Insights (Ridge)
200+
Ecommerce Connectors
200+
Brands
~95%
Forecast Accuracy
iQ Essentials starts at $1,999/mo  — priced for $10–50M brands, not enterprise. Less than the hourly rate of an outsourced data person.
What's Inside

The worst time to find out Q4 wasn't profitable is February.

Get the 24 prompts. Run them against your own data this week. If your stack answers all of them cleanly, you've spent ten minutes and earned a clean bill of health. If it doesn't, you've found your Q4 risk register while there's still time to act on it.

Send Me The 24 Prompts

$1,999/month · Live in 10 days · No data engineers needed

iQ Essentials starts at $1,999/mo  — priced for $10–50M brands, not enterprise. Less than the hourly rate of an outsourced data person.