Nearly every "the report is wrong" call comes down to one of four things. Work down the list — the first one accounts for most of them.
1. Returns
This is the big one. Refunds are handled differently from what most people expect, and differently in different reports.
A sale you refunded in full disappears. It is not subtracted — it is removed. Its value leaves gross sales, its tax leaves tax collected, and it stops being counted as a transaction at all, in the period it was sold, not the period it was refunded.
Say Monday's report read $500 across 12 sales. On Tuesday a customer returns a $100 sale in full. Re-run Monday's report and it now reads $400 across 11 sales — the day changed under you, and Tuesday shows no sign of the refund at all.
A sale you refunded only part of does not move at all. Return two items out of five and the sale keeps counting at its full original value, in every report, for ever. The money you gave back appears nowhere.
The one exception is the Sales Tax report. It carries a Refunds (this period) line and subtracts refunds from its net figures, counting them in the period the refund happened. That is why the Sales Tax report and the Sales Summary can show different numbers for the same days, and both are behaving as built.
What to do. Keep your own note of refunds — the date, the sale number and the amount. There is no report that lists them. For anything that has to reconcile, work from the Sales Tax report's refund line and your own note.
2. Store credit is missing from Payment Methods
The Payment Methods report shows three figures: Cash sales, Card sales, Total sales.
Cash and Card are exactly what was tendered in cash and on a card. Total sales is the whole value of the sales. If a customer paid with store credit — their rewards wallet — that money is in Total and in neither of the other two.
So Cash + Card does not add up to Total on any day a customer spent store credit, and the gap is the store credit spent. That is the correct reading, not an error.
A sale split between cash and a card is fine: both halves land in their own column.
3. The drawer count is cash only, and refunds are not in it
Closing a register compares what you counted against opening float + cash taken on that register + cash you added − cash you dropped.
Card takings and store credit are not part of it, by design — they never touched the drawer.
But cash refunds are not part of it either, and they did touch the drawer. If you paid a customer $40 back in cash from the till, the close still expects that $40 to be there, and you count $40 short. The shortfall is not a miscount.
What to do. Record a Cash drop for the amount of any cash refund at the time you pay it, with the sale number as the note. That takes it out of the expected figure and your count comes back level, and it leaves a record of why.
4. The range or the location is not what you think
- The date range is inclusive of both ends. A report From the 1st To the 1st is one day.
- The location filter narrows to the sales rung at that location. Leave it empty for the whole business.
- A report is generated when you ask for it, from the data as it stands then. Two people running the same report minutes apart can legitimately get different numbers if a sale or a refund happened in between.
When to escalate
Call Stratamize when a number is wrong in a way none of the four explains — a figure that changes when nothing changed, a total that does not match the sales listed under it, or a report that will not generate. Send the report name, the exact date range, and the location.