When a tribe connects its point of sale, the sync starts bringing in sales from that moment onwards. Everything the tribe sold before it connected stays where it was, which means a tribe that joined in June has no figures to compare against last year and drops out of every year-on-year report.
A backfill fixes that by reading a span of history from the platform and bringing it in. Open the tribe, select Sales Reports, then Settings, and find the Backfill Sales History card.
Running one
- The card lists the point of sale platforms this tribe is connected to.
- Select Backfill beside the one you want.
- Choose the date to go back to. It starts at twelve months ago, which suits most networks — it is enough to give every report a year to compare against.
- Submit. The backfill is queued and runs in the background.
History arrives in pieces rather than all at once, because it is read a month at a time. A twelve-month backfill on a busy tribe takes a while, and the figures fill in as it goes. There is no progress bar — check the sales reports after an hour or two rather than watching for one.
Not every platform yet
Backfilling has to be built separately for each platform, because each one exposes its history differently. Toast can be backfilled today. Platforms where it has not been built show the button greyed out with "not available yet" beside them, so you can see the connection is recognised and the capability simply is not there.
What comes with it
A backfill brings in the orders and, where the platform records them, the customers who placed them. Those customers are matched to the people you already hold for that tribe — by an existing link first, then by email address, then by phone number — and are attached to the tribe when they are new. A customer the platform holds with neither an email address nor a phone number is recorded against the sale but does not become a contact, because there would be no way to reach them or to recognise them again.