Transactions and the day's reports

Transactions is the record of money: every payment taken, whatever screen took it, in one list.

This is the screen to trust when a total looks wrong. A figure on the Dashboard is a summary of rows that live here, so a disagreement between the two is resolved by finding the row, not by re-adding the summary. Each row carries the method, the channel it came from, and who initiated it.

1. Open Transactions.
2. Use Search order, transaction, or card… to find one payment. The search accepts an order number, a transaction reference or the last digits of a card.
3. Open a row to see what it belongs to — the order or the booking behind it.
4. Select the reports view for the period you need.
5. At closing, read the Z-Report (Today): Gross Sales, Net Sales, VAT, Total Refunds, Ticket Count and the Payment Methods breakdown.
6. Compare the Payment Methods breakdown against the drawer before you reconcile cash. The cash figure is the one that has to match physically.

Gross Sales

Everything taken, before refunds

Net Sales

What is left after refunds

VAT

The tax portion included in the prices

Ticket Count

How many sales, not how much money

Cash Drawer Reconciliation

The cash figure to check against the physical drawer

The Z-Report is a closing figure, so read it once, at the end. Reading it mid-afternoon and again at closing produces two different numbers and the temptation to explain the difference as an error, when the only thing that changed is how much you sold in between.

A refund is issued against the original payment, so find the payment first and refund from it. Refunding by taking a new negative payment instead leaves two records that have to be read together to make sense, and the reports will show both.

There are also an X-Report and a Booking report. The X-Report is a mid-day reading that does not close anything; the Booking report answers the same questions for appointments rather than counter sales.